As much as we live in a fire-dependent biome, we also live in a city where we expect to be safe from wildlife incursions and fire, yet increasingly we are not.
Nicky Schmidt is the founder and chair of Parkscape, a voluntary NPO focused on community, safety, environment and urban greenspace in the wildland-urban interfaces of Table Mountain National Park.
As Cape Town – like all cities – grows, new development, formal and informal, results in even denser urban edges blurring the lines of the wildland-urban interface, exacerbating the reality of the decreasing buffer zones within the national park, and increasing the risk of fire to life and property. We have seen this repeatedly this season where fires have swept through hectares of woody fynbos that should have been burnt years ago.
The resultant slash from removal has to be control-burnt or physically removed. But this either isn’t happening or, where it is, it’s at too slow a rate. By and large, slash is being left in situ, fuelling wildfires. Where species like pines and gums exist as street trees or in controlled environments such as plantation forestry and cultural landscapes, these have to be actively managed, ensuring the ground below the canopy is kept clear of woody debris and hazardous/dead trees are regularly removed.
Then there is the current prickly matter of firebreaks that have to be cut and maintained annually to provide a barrier from which firefighters can fight back against fire and endeavour to prevent wildfires from reaching the urban edge., “the City of Cape Town last year withdrew from a long-standing agreement with SANParks to maintain the peninsula’s firebreak network”.
A final factor in all of this is the role of the ever-decreasing but critical buffer zones. The buffer zones were inscribed by Unesco within the Table Mountain World Heritage Site in 2004 to protect the genetic integrity of the fynbos from anthropogenic influences and climate change.
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