Insurance firm planting trees in SA to combat drought risk

The country’s biggest agricultural insurer is working to actively reduce drought risk with a vanguard project to restore living landscapes

 

Land degradation and desertification is now affecting 168 countries around the world, according to the UN, but many here believe there is hope. Living Lands, an international not-for-profit organisation, started working here in 2008 to bring together the users and beneficiaries of this water catchment; government, communities and farmers like Kruger.

Together they have already planted more than 3.7 million trees to try to stop land degradation and restore the degraded water catchment system.

One of the things that makes the project remarkable is funding from South Africa’s biggest agricultural insurer Santam. Rather than just assessing risk and charging premiums to match it, they are actively trying to reduce risk.

The city has doubled in size since 1997, while increasing water delivery to under-serviced areas. Combined with climate change these activities have brewed a perfect storm.

In the 20th century farmers here were subsidised to run as many sheep as they could and cut water channels into the land to aid runoff. These practices wiped out the subtropical thicket, a forest which retained water during periods of low rainfall. Compounding that, South African scientists say the changing climate now causes rain to fall in more isolated storms, which in turn cause even more runoff.

This “double whammy” is typical of degraded lands around the world, according to conservation group IUCN, which recently highlighted the restoration project as a successful way to regenerate landscapes.

The approach developed relationships between everyone who has a stake in the water, the land and the jobs that depend upon it, and in turn started restoring the landscape, planting trees, creating weirs and funding it through public and private finance gathered from users.

 

“This is a business imperative for us, the likelihood of our sustainability is highly dependent on this,” said Ray-Ann Sedres, head of integrated sustainability at Santam. She feels that projects such as this are crucial for the company to survive in a warming world.

All this is good news for the 1.4 million people in nearby Port Elizabeth who have been suffering under water restrictions off and on since 2007.

Sedres accepts that Santam’s expertise doesn’t lie in planting trees. “The strength of our business does not lie in land rehabilitation, it lies in the fact that we understand risk.”

Read more at Original news source: theguardian.com