The Case of South Africa

Abstract

South Africa is in general a dry country, where the vegetation cover is determined by its low mean annual rainfall. As a result most of the country is covered by dry savanna woodland or woodland scrub. Midgley et al (1997) define forests as being closed-canopy plant communities comprising mainly woody plants more than 5m tall and maintain that within this definition patches of forest occur within almost all southern African biomes. Most natural evergreen forests are found in areas of higher rainfall, however, in a narrow broken belt along the southern and eastern seaboard, and in the country’s mountainous regions towards the eastern borders with Swaziland and Mozambique (Figure1) (Low and Rebelo, 1996). Estimates of the area covered by closed canopy forests vary between 0.25% (Low and Rebelo, 1996) and 0.59% of the land surface (DEAT, 1997) while savanna woodlands and plantations make up between 35 and 40%, and 1.4% respectively (Shackleton and Mander, 2000; Owen and van der Zel, 2000). There are approximately 420,000 ha of indigenous closed forest (about 300 000 ha enclosed in protected areas), 32-40 million ha woodlands; and 1.5 million ha of plantation forests.