Environmental degradation trends in SADC

The level of environmental degradation associated with economic activity is an important indicator of the amount of pressure or burden that the economy places on the environ-ment and compromises its ability to fulfil key functions, such as life support, input- or natural-resource provision, sink functions (or the environment’s ability to assimilate or absorb waste/by-products up to a certain level), and provision of natural amenities (scenic views, biodiversity, and so on). With a finite environment, the growth of the economy in-evitably has a bearing on environmental sustainability, particularly given the relationship between the economy and the environment.

Figure 6.1: Summary of the relationships between the environment and the economy:

Source: Authors’ construction

A number of indicators can be used to understand the nature and extent of economic stresses on the environment. Many of these are said to be potential and actual partial sources of environmental instabilities, leading to effects such as climate change.

6.1.1: Extent of natural resource use in SADC

The extent of natural resource use is a useful indicator of the amount of stress that eco-nomic activity places on the environment. In the SADC subregion, a few countries (An-gola, DRC and Zambia) have recorded a relatively high level of natural resource depletion (Table 6.1) given that they are highly dependent on natural resource rents (Table 6.2).

These economies are heavily dependent on extractive industries in mining and oil exploi-tation for their economic growth and foreign exchange earnings. The potential and re-alised impacts on environmental degradation of extraction-based industrial and economic development are well documented in the development literature. Unchecked, this is likely to result in an unsustainable environment, which could cause an adverse vicious cycle of reduced growth in the respective economies and hinder progress in human development.

Table 6.1: Natural resource depletion (% of GNI)⁴⁰

Source: constructed from World Bank WDI data

Table 6.2: Total natural resources rents (% of GDP)

1990 2000 2005 2010 Source: constructed from World Bank WDI data

Another major strain on the environment is the extent of land use in agriculture. Implicit in Figure 6.3 – which illustrates the proportion of land under agriculture across the SADC countries in 2009 – is that the populations are highly dependent agriculture. A significant portion of those engaged in agriculture are poor subsistence and peasant farmers in rural areas, and the level of technological and technical sophistication in agricultural produc-tion is limited. Thus, as seen earlier, the agriculture sector in most SADC countries has the lowest labour and total factor productivity.

Figure 6.3: Agricultural land (% of land area), 2009

Source: constructed from World Bank WDI data

With such huge proportions of the populations depending on agriculture, the environ-mental burden of low-sophistication agricultural activities cannot be over-emphasized. It compromises environmental sustainability. It is therefore not surprising that the MDG targets related to environmental sustainability is among the least likely to be achieved in SADC. There is urgent need to intensify subregional efforts to address environmental sustainability issues. The subregional efforts will have to be underpinned by well-thought out, home-grown national policies, strategies and actions.

6.1.2 Deforestation and desertification

Another potentially significant stress on the environment relates to the level of deforesta-tion and the amount of desertificadeforesta-tion that this could imply over the long term. Forest area is an importance source of timber for construction and furniture manufacturing, as well as for wood-fuel used in cooking. The energy needs among poorer segments of society, who cannot afford electricity, petroleum fuels and bio-fuels, are largely met through the harvesting of forest resources, either legally or illegally.

In the absence of comparable deforestation data, a look at the trends in the levels of land use under forests is a useful proxy for providing insights about the underlying levels of deforestation. Figure 6.4 presents country-level data on the proportion of land that is designated as forest area in SADC. The reference years are 1990, 2000, 2005 and 2010.

Figure 6.4: Land use: Forest area (% of total land area)⁴¹

Source: Authors’ construction using WDI data

The main observation is that 12 SADC member States experienced varying degrees of loss of forest area. The exceptions were Lesotho and Seychelles, which maintained exactly the same levels of forest areas during the reference period, and Swaziland which increased its land use under forests. The most dramatic losses were in Zimbabwe, followed by Tanzania.

On average, the land use under forest areas declined from about 40 per cent in 1990 to 32 per cent in 2010. Very crudely, this implies an 8 percentage points (20 per cent) reduction over the past 20 years and if not checked this could mean that forests in SADC will have declined to only 16 per cent of the total land area by 2050. This trend is clearly environ-mentally unsustainable and places the current and next generation in imminent danger of desertification and bio-diversity losses.

41 Data reported are most recent at the time of preparing this report

Other important determinants of environmental quality (or lack thereof, through degra-dation) are the patterns of human settlement in a given country or subregion. Growing urbanisation is a particular concern in terms of environmental sustainability, often skewing the impact of human activities on the environment. The effects of urbanisation also include social and economic stresses such as pollution, social strife (e.g., crime, deviancy and so on), deterioration or limits to social services in health, education, water and sanitation, and over-crowding, all associated with population expansion in the urban areas. On the other hand, the effect of urbanisation is a loss of labour and productivity in rural areas, with the most productive and youthful labour often being the main form of labour lost. In rural areas, the increasingly sparse population often also faces higher transactional costs as it becomes harder and harder for social services and other public works to reach each person (access to services per square kilometre) and as people find it more and more difficult to reach each other to engage in economic and social activities.

The SADC situation points to a trend of generally increasing urbanisation over time (Figure 6.5). All the countries in SADC experienced varying degrees of increased urban popula-tions out of their total populapopula-tions, except for Mauritius which saw a marginal decline in the proportion of its urban population between 1990 and 2011, and Zambia, which saw a decline in its urban population share between 1990-2004 and a marginal increase during 2005-2011. This suggests that the vast majority of countries have become increasingly more urbanised over time.

Figure 6.5: Urban populations in SADC (% of total population), 1990-2011⁴²

Source: constructed from World Bank WDI

The SADC subregion will therefore have to formulate and apply subregional and national policies and actions for fostering more rational and environmentally friendly patterns of hu-42 At the time of preparing this report, the WDI had not updated their statistics on this variable to

include 2011.

man settlement. Efforts to reduce and even reverse rural-to-urban migration trends will have to be intensified. This could be through positive discrimination in terms of the formulation of rural-development strategies and the establishment of rural incentives, such as spatial tax holidays for rural enterprises and/or labour. Making rural areas more attractive than they are currently perceived to be is likely to help to keep the rural populations in those localities. As a result, urbanisation along with all its challenges is likely to be mitigated.