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Coal mining fear sparks unexpected conservation boom in Mpumalanga
The ecologically rich grasslands in Mpumalanga's highveld have become a front line in the struggle between biodiversity and coal mining.
Fearful of open-cast mining's devastating impacts, a growing number of South African landowners are turning to an unconventional shield: biodiversity protection. While their motives may not be entirely green, the outcome has been, in the words of Brian Morris, 'a blessing in disguise' for conservation and South Africa's biodiversity conservation goals.
Morris heads the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency's biodiversity stewardship programme, which allows for the declaration of 'protected areas on land owned by private individuals, by communities, by companies and trusts'.
Unconventional shield
These landowners commit to 'long-term commitments to essentially manage these areas as private protected areas.' Crucially, when formal protected areas are declared, they are legally protected from mining developments. This makes them an effective defence against open-cast coal mining, which 'is steadily eating away vast tracts of conservation-worthy grasslands', said Morris.
Notably, these grasslands hold high biodiversity value, but also happen to be where 'most of the mineral reserves, the coal, and so on' are located, said Morris. He said this 'inevitable conflict' was a microcosm of a larger national struggle.
Conservation, he said, had often been 'cast as an elitist luxury, something that gets in the way of jobs and housing and food production and other needs'.
In this context, the Mpumalanga Parks' initiative — even with its mixed motivations — offers a practical path toward a 'more inclusive and more holistic vision and implementation' of conservation, one that recognises that 'land holds multiple values — ecological, economic, spiritual — and that these values can coexist', said Morris.
Morris was talking at the latest Tipping Points webinar, titled Conservation beyond Borders. Hosted by Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation (OGRC), the webinar tackled a pressing global question: How can countries such as South Africa protect biodiversity without sidelining development and human rights?
Joining Morris on the panel were environmental historian and conservation biographer, Simon Pooley, and Natasha Wilson, the South African National Park's expansion manager.
The discussions were facilitated by Kina Murphy, the chief scientist and Africa director for the Campaign for Nature, which focuses on protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 — a goal set as a key conservation benchmark at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2022 in Montreal, Canada.
Murphy highlighted the urgency of the task. With up to two million species at risk of extinction this decade, she stressed that new, inclusive models of conservation were essential.
South Africa, which helped shape the goal during the negotiations, has committed to protect 1.4 million hectares through formal reserves and another 10 million via so-called OECMs (Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures). These include community and privately managed lands that support biodiversity, even if not primarily for that purpose.
There was consensus among the panellists that while these goals were laudable, turning that vision into reality was anything but simple. The obstacles are many: complex land ownership and community governance issues; conflicting government plans; few real incentives for landowners — and conservation agencies stretched thin.
On-the-ground realities
Then comes the issue of managing protected areas amid thorny on-the-ground realities. Setting the scene, Pooley brought a hard edge to the conversation through a sobering historical lens.
'I'm slightly Mr Bad News today,' he quipped, as he recounted the layered, unresolved struggles at Ndumo Game Reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal — one of South Africa's oldest protected areas, now under siege, 101 years after its proclamation in 1924.
Pooley grew up in Ndumo, describing it as 'a little pocket of extraordinary biodiversity nestled in the confluence of the Usuthu and the Pongola rivers … teeming with water, birds, fishes, harumphing hippopotamus and crocodiles basking on the grazing lawns'.
Like many others, Pooley's childhood, immersed in this natural world, led to him becoming a conservationist. But this was not the case for many of his childhood playmates, whose parents had once lived inside the reserve.
'Many South Africans were evicted from this fenced reserve. This was to maintain a refuge on the country's most biodiverse floodplain for animals which are difficult to live with, like crocodiles, hippos, rhinos,' said Pooley.
This gave rise to deep, unresolved tensions.
'Locals had been living alongside the wildlife from the proclamation of the reserve in 1924 up until 1966,' Pooley noted. But during apartheid, animal conservation was prioritised over people's rights.
When remittances failed to arrive back from the mines, 'mothers and children entered the reserve to catch animals for food. What had been subsistence use was now classified as poaching,' said Pooley. Rangers, he added, were caught between enforcing the law and sympathising with the hunger and hardship around them.
In recent years, the reserve was handed to a new provincial authority, and a land claim was settled in 2008. Although 'co-management with communities commenced' and 'the era of fortress conservation was over,' Pooley said the practical management plans for the reserve were never clearly defined, and the terms of the land claim were disputed — and still are.
Politicians' promises
Then, 'during fierce political campaigning in national elections, politicians made rash promises to give locals land in the reserve,' said Pooley.
These pledges to return land crossed the bounds of legality and were later abandoned. All of this, combined with high unemployment and the lack of much promised development, fuelled anger among the local population, leading to fence cutting and illegal occupation.
The Ndumo Game Reserve — the most prominent local symbol of provincial authority — became 'a lightning rod for frustration', said Pooley.
Today, despite the dedicated work of generations of conservationists, Ndumo is under serious threat. Its eastern region is under occupation by farmers, fishermen and cattle herders. It has suffered the loss of all its rhinos and a 'shocking decline' in crocodile and hippo numbers. Now, mineral prospecting applications are in progress.
In conclusion, Pooley acknowledged that while it was important to find new land to conserve to achieve the 30×30 targets, a lot more could be done to better manage and preserve existing protected areas.
'Let's not forget to protect the land we've already got,' said Pooley.
Morris agreed. 'We're kind of neglecting what we already have, and I see this as a serious challenge.'
Morris acknowledged, too, that the process of declaring a protected area was 'by no means easy'.
'It takes time,' he said, 'anything from 12 months to two years.' He said over the past 15 years, Mpumalanga had added 162,859 hectares to its protected area estate, but at this rate, it would take 'another 68 years to reach the 30% target. '
He said while progress was being made in encouraging landowners to conserve their land, better incentives could be offered to counter the 'indiscriminate granting of mining rights even within some of our protected areas.'
And unfortunately, 'areas of high biodiversity value virtually always lose out' in strategic land use planning debates.
He cited as an example the massive expansion of wind energy facilities in the grassy biomes of Mpumalanga, driven by the country's weak grid capacity. This, he said, posed significant threats to birds and bats, potentially impacting on biodiversity in the region.
Looking to the future, Natasha Wilson said South Africa's 'remarkable biodiversity' demands a rethink of how conservation is done — and who it's for.
Historically, SANParks has worked 'very much within our fences and within our boundaries,' but the organisation is now undergoing a 'radical departure' from this model. The future, she said, lay outside the fences, in partnerships that recognised the need to balance people and nature.
New approaches
A good example, said Wilson, was a new national park being declared in the grasslands near Maclear in the north-eastern Eastern Cape. 'Here, we are working with a range of landowners who are willingly contributing their land to conservation,' she said. 'And we've taken quite a different stance — we're looking at livestock as a driver in the ecosystem, as part of the park.'
The initiative reflects a broader SANParks strategy rooted in the idea of 'mega living landscapes' — places where conservation supports, and is supported by, the people who live there. Wilson acknowledged this was 'very difficult work' and often a process of 'learning as you're doing', but said there was growing momentum, with 'just over 10,000 hectares' in the pipeline for declaration later this year.
Essential to the success of this inclusive, landscape-level approach was building social legitimacy through power-sharing and respect for people's rights and dignity, said Wilson. And this involved collaborating with diverse landholders, from communal farmers to private landowners, and using legislative tools such as biodiversity stewardship to scale up conservation beyond protected areas.
Beyond monetary value
As the discussion wrapped up, it moved to the very essence of why conservation was pursued, moving beyond purely economic justifications. Pooley argued that if conservation was forced to 'pay its way' and measured only by 'rand value', it would 'lose every single time that the mining, or whatever the latest scheme to grow cotton, comes along'.
He also said many conservationists often forgot that there was 'homegrown local, indigenous interest in conservation'. Therefore, it shouldn't be seen as 'a sort of battle to convert people to something entirely new'.
Murphy agreed, stressing that modern conservation efforts should support and empower existing, long-standing practices of land stewardship deeply embedded within indigenous cultures.
'The land is invaluable, priceless actually, we cannot put a price tag on it,' said Murphy. And for indigenous people, 'it's not a new thing to conserve their land'.
According to the World Bank, about 476 million indigenous people, including those in Africa, hold tenure rights to about a quarter of the world's surface area, accounting for a significant portion of the world's biodiversity. DM
Fred Kockott is the director of the environmental journalism training agency, Roving Reporters. This article was produced with assistance from Jive Media Africa, science communication partner of Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.
