Have your say on N2 project
[caption id="attachment_36727" align="alignright" width="300"] CRITICALLY ENDANGERED: The succulent Corpuscularia lehmannii. Picture: ADRIAAN GROBLER[/caption]
FOLLOWING on the March launch of the exciting Save the Baakens River Valley initiative, the first challenge to the successful realisation of that initiative has presented itself.
It comes in the form of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s proposed N2 North Development: 3019 houses, connecting roads and assorted businesses to be built on 71ha of land in Hunter’s Retreat, between Cape Road and the highway -- within the source catchment of the upper Baakens River.
The Baakens rescue initiative is based on protecting and reviving the river and the valley through which it runs, capitalising on its full economic, recreational, educational and environmental value and making it more accessible to all the people of the metro.
The initiative has presented a detailed plan of how the lower Baakens could look with decanalisation, rehabilitation and the establishment of sustainable enterprises. But the valley is a single entity and whatever happens downriver will be affected by our management of the source. And building roads and houses there, says landscape architect Rose Buchanan, chief architect of the rescue initiative, would be a poor management decision.
It will cause soil erosion on site and sedimentation downstream causing an influx of alien vegetation and loss of natural vegetation, threatening fish like the endangered redfin minnow and exacerbating conditions for flooding, impacting on the city’s economy and the quality of people’s lives. Flood risk will also be ramped up with all the new hard impermeable surfaces and increased stormwater run-off.
“This sort of development should be seen in the same light as developing on the side of Table Mountain,” she says. “ It should not be allowed under any circumstances.”
The project contravenes all current trends for a sustainable compact city and promotes urban sprawl, she argues. It will mean extra expenditure for services, and other infrastructure in an already strained economy, demanding a vast new volume of energy and resources (longer roads and service provision lines) and making no use of existing material. A more sustainable approach would be to look for development opportunities within the city where buildings can be converted or renovated. Sited as it is on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, the N2 North project removes economic growth from the inner city.
It has not been spelt out but indications are the metro’s intention is that many of the residents of the new houses will work at the Bay West mega-mall which is being built just to the south of the new site. But how sustainable is that enterprise? And even if it attracts the crowds it will need, what cost to the whole?
Bay West was approved in 2012 under highly controversial circumstances by the then Eastern Cape MEC for economic affairs environment and tourism, Mcebisi Jonas, after he had already upheld his department’s rejection of the developer’s application to destroy a critically sensitive rocky outcrop.
Dr Nelia Garner, NMMU botanist, Custodians of Rare Wildflowers leader and a committee member of the Baakens Preservation Trust, says the Bay West development has made Rowallan Park Grassy Fynbos vegetation with its distinctive quartzite outcrops even rarer than it was. The N2 North site is now likely the largest remaining intact piece left of this precious vegetation.
The N2 North site is rich in plant species that are threatened with extinction, she notes. Most occur on or near the outcrops and they include the flowering shrub Gonaqua buchu and the succulent Corpuscularia lehmannii, both of which are found in the metro and nowhere else in the world.
Garner says that while the project envisages protecting this diversity, a small green space will not be enough to secure these species and the ecological processes which sustain them and the river.
The good news is that unlike with the Bay West project everything seems transparent here and, early on in the process, public comment is being sought. Our metro should be applauded in this regard.
This comment will inform specialist studies which will also be done up front and the information gathered will then be used to determine if the N2 North development will impact on the Baakens source catchment and if so whether it can be mitigated, and how – or if it is a fatal flaw and the development cannot go ahead.
The comment process is open until July 3, the background information document can be got from CEN, the metro’s appointed independent consultant (steenbok@aerosat.co.za) and comments or concerns should be sent to them as well.
Time to get involved.
