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Speaker 1: And some good news are something that I'm very excited about,

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Speaker 1: loving the wilderness and nature the way that I do.

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Speaker 1: The Western Cape has proclaimed twenty new nature reserves, twenty

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Speaker 1: officially added to the province's protected network in the past year.

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Speaker 1: That's an expansion of protected areas by more than eighty

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Speaker 1: one thousand hectares. And this is in critical by diversity regions,

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Speaker 1: the Cedarburg, the Egallas Plain, Little Karoo Garden Route. The

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Speaker 1: CEO of Cape Nature, Ashley Naidoo, joins us now, Ashley,

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Speaker 1: very good afternoon, Thank you very much for your time.

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Speaker 2: Thank you, and good afternoon.

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Speaker 1: John. Look. I mean this seems to me something to

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Speaker 1: raise up our arms and go hallelujah about bidiversity. Protection

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Speaker 1: is such an important thing that the world is only

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Speaker 1: patchurally doing and this is a major boost for us

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Speaker 1: in the province. I think.

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Speaker 2: It is a major boost. There's a long way to

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Speaker 2: go and if we have time, I'll get to where

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Speaker 2: we want to be. But eighty one thousand actors across

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Speaker 2: twenty reserves across the Western Cape, which has its opportunities

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Speaker 2: and challenges, and that it's not a monotone. It's the

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Speaker 2: Gallus Banks from the trans fluctor very different, so it's

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Speaker 2: not a one size foots all and we have to

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Speaker 2: make small steps. So the temptation is to go very large,

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Speaker 2: but the requirement is that we have to look at

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Speaker 2: a representative network of critically endangered or the ones that

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Speaker 2: are so endemic that they don't occur anywhere else or

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Speaker 2: even across the province. So a step by step, small

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Speaker 2: approach and we we're certainly glad for the eighty one

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Speaker 2: thousand actors, but there's a while to go.

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Speaker 1: Much of the land I understand Ashley has been made

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Speaker 1: available by private landowners, reflecting again a great attitude.

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Speaker 2: It does, it does. We are extremely grateful we have people.

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Speaker 2: We have a very strong connection to the land. Often

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Speaker 2: the private landowners have had these lands for generations and

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Speaker 2: there's a strong bond with the land and it makes

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Speaker 2: the conversations we have to have easier. A few years ago,

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Speaker 2: as Cape Nature with the other government departments we set as,

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Speaker 2: we spend some time developing priority areas so we do

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Speaker 2: know the areas we want. We have a priority map

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Speaker 2: of critically endangered habitats or habitats that require a protection.

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Speaker 2: So we actively work against this priority map and it

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Speaker 2: requires that we speak to landowners because certainly there's some

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Speaker 2: land that's owned by the state that we'll want to declare,

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Speaker 2: but a lot of the areas that we after according

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Speaker 2: to our priority bio diversity maps our own privately. Having

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Speaker 2: said that, the largest of these land parcels that we

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Speaker 2: declared we did do in partnership with the Worldwide Life

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Speaker 2: On WWF South Africa, so they're an extremely important partner

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Speaker 2: and they do acquire large pieces of the land. The

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Speaker 2: largest of those twenty are represented here, So we have

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Speaker 2: a strong partnership with wwfho acquire some of this land

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Speaker 2: that needs to be declared as well.

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Speaker 1: In terms of what needs still to be done, So

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Speaker 1: you've added eighty one thousand hectares in roughly a year.

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Speaker 1: I mean, how much remains to be added and what

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Speaker 1: are the prospects for adding that so that all of

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Speaker 1: the Priority by diversity areas are protected in a way

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Speaker 1: that they need to be protected.

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Speaker 2: Okay, so years the difficult part of the Equation Global

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Speaker 2: Agreement suggests that we need to represent or we need

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Speaker 2: to protect thirty percent of a represented area of different

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Speaker 2: ecological type. So what that means for the Western Cape

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Speaker 2: we do need to get to about one point seven

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Speaker 2: million hectors additional to where we are at the moment.

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Speaker 2: At the moment, we have about two point two million hectors,

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Speaker 2: and I want use too many numbers, but we need

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Speaker 2: another one point seven million hectors. So if we say

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Speaker 2: we've got a one hundred thousand, we need a fifteen

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Speaker 2: to eighteen years of this sort of rate to get

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Speaker 2: to thirty percent of protected areas in the Western Cape.

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Speaker 1: Ashley, thank you very much for sharing that news with us.

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Speaker 1: Great work done, but greater work still to be done.

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Speaker 1: Ashley and I do the CEO of Cape Nature