Water quality and land uses in the Wilderness area

Abstract

Water resource management Too much and too little water are things most South Africans understand well, living in a highly variable and semi-arid environment. However, increasingly, we as South Africans are also becoming sensitised to local issues of water pollution, especially through reports of acid mine drainage entering our water sources such as the Vaal and Olifants catchments. More frequently, we get stirred by accounts of water pollution by some land use approaches that break the ‘water web’ we rely on for our daily services. To avoid this, our perspectives need to broaden, and we need to increase our ability to see the complex interactions between humans and nature, between land and water uses. We also need to ensure that our governing bodies are integrative of these issues, ensuring that they are no longer being dealt with in isolation. For this reason the CSIR has commenced a challenging threeyear project, which aims to integrate and mainstream water quality into land use, water resource and estuary management and decision-making processes in the Wilderness area.

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