The Greater Addo National Park, South Africa: Biodiversity Conservation as the Basis for a Healthy Ecosystem and Human Development Opportunities

The recognition that ecosystem health is strongly linked to human welfare, and that many ecosystems have been heavily degraded under human domination — resulting in reduced capacity to support human populations — is a dominant feature of the environmental debate (e.g., Rapport et al., 1998). This has led to a search for ecosystem management strategies to maintain ecosystem health, ranging from water pollution management to disease control and sustainable resource utilization. To some extent this process has been hampered by the inability to look beyond conventional management strategies in order to recognize and develop new opportunities for extracting resources from ecosystems, while maintaining these systems in a healthy and functional state. This deficit is particularly apparent in rangeland ecosystems that traditionally have been used for domestic herbivore production through pastoralism, despite considerable evidence of the threats to ecosystem health that this strategy imposes (e.g., Fleischner, 1994). We present here the background of ecosystem degradation and loss of ecosystem resources due to pastoralism in the Eastern Cape Province (hereafter “Eastern Cape”) in South Africa (Figure 39.1), an area of spectacular biodiversity, and assess the consequences of alternate management strategies. We show how an initiative to address these problems, based on the recognition that biodiversity conservation yields tangible human development opportunities that include the full range of ecosystem services, is developing.