Page 12 - State of Biodiversity 2019-2020

4.2. Percentage of D’MOSS that is Protected
As of the 2019/2020 financial year, only 7.03% of D’MOSS areas enjoy some form of official protection (Table 2); the same percentage as the previous year. This includes various categories of protection types: proclaimed and unproclaimed private or public nature reserves; properties that have been bought through the EM’s Environmental Land Acquisition Programme; sites where sensitive portions have been protected by non- user conservation servitudes or conservation zones during the development approval process; and sites that have been rezoned to conservation. As with last year’s report, it is important to note that this may appear as a decrease from the 2017/2018 State of Biodiversity Report, which was 8.20% of D’MOSS protected, however, this is a result of D’MOSS itself expanding in 2018 from
approximately 79 000ha to 95 000ha. There was, in fact, an increase in the relative protected D’MOSS area from 6 459.2ha in 2017/2018 to 6 664.7ha in 2019/2020.
The total protected area in EM is calculated as 2.65% for 2019/2020 (Table 2). This is still below the Convention of Biological Diversity’s requirement for all governments to protect a minimum of 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10% of coastal and marine areas. In addition, it has been noted that these flat targets may be too small to adequately ensure the preservation of habitat types into perpetuity as it may not have a compelling ecological rationale. As a consequence, South Africa has adopted a more scientific-based approach to setting conservation targets.
8 STATE OF BIODIVERSITY REPORT 2019/2020