We need to change the way we read Earth’s balance sheet

Nature is effortlessly more elegant than the graffitied concrete facsimile we have created to replace it. It pays us infinite dividends. Fibonacci quantified his sequence on nature’s beauty in the 11th century, but, sadly, most of us have forgotten that we are even part of it. Either that or we have suddenly awoken to the terrifying realisation that we have been wilfully self-harming and are on the verge of collective hara-kiri.

I recently spent a week in the Kruger National Park, on business. This should be an oxymoron — though, having experienced my epiphany, I have recently shifted my focus to the sustainable financing of nature in the profound rush to save the planet.

If you haven’t been to the Kruger or its surrounds lately, do so immediately. This spectacular part of southeast African lowveld was originally protected from post-industrial man by the mosquito and the tsetse fly. When advances in modern medicine immunised big game hunters from nature’s guardians, the Sabie Reserve was proclaimed by Paul Kruger in 1898. The practice of game preservation has evolved over time. The original rangers of Col Stevenson-Hamilton’s era spent much of their time “preserving” game by culling predators.

The Kruger National Park became our first national park in 1926 and has been largely unspoilt by man ever since. It is the physical manifestation of the Garden of Eden imagined in Genesis — albeit with fewer dangerous apples. The relative toxicity of the serpents is more complex. Oom Paul is hailed for this act, and we can thank his Calvinist God that he did. Since 2000, the Kruger National Park has joined the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe to form the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park & Conservation Area (GLTFCA), with a total protected area of 35,000km². This allowed the elephants the opportunity to resume their historical migration routes in search of water and grazing away from the unregulated civil war guns in the north and the east.

This enormous landscape allows large mammals the freedom to roam wherever their instinct and the ancient laws compel them to in their search for food, water and opportunities for extrafamilial procreation. It provides indigenous flora the space to grow in its natural environment without competition from aliens with better programming to access scarce resources, and my son’s favourite, the chameleon, the chance to practise camouflage to avoid extinction; a fate that has befallen so many other species in the past 50 years.

In the context of the terrifying world we live in, the GLTFCA is a magnificent, and oddly unheralded, achievement by a species as fond of bragging about its prowess as it is proficient at destroying Earth’s natural resources.

This is The Lion King de-cartooned and in the raw, with no lights as far as the eye can see — and not even because of Eskom’s ineptitude. It is madness to consider that South Africans would take their children to Disneyland to see Walt Disney’s cartoon figures before coming here for the real thing. Just R100 and some change buys you the freedom of a full day of marvelling at the Earth in the form it was supposed to evolve into in whatever way you choose — provided you don’t leave your car or slaughter anything.

A small detour off the main road leads to a river scene lined with fever trees and giant figs. Giraffes sip water awkwardly on a sandy beach beside a family of elephants having a morning wash, while hippos alternate between snorts and jaw stretches in the deeper water. Giant crocodiles absorb energy like terrifying riverbed solar panels, pretending not to watch.  Light reflects off the twirling horns of a kudu in the shade, while impala edge anxiously to the water like geriatrics starting to cross a road. A fish eagle shrieks from the highest lookout, while a kingfisher hovers. Satiated predators snooze out of site. A few zebras wander into the picture, as if requested to add texture by a visual director curating the scene.

The effect of nature on the soul is transformative and even religious for some, particularly listening to the morning bush chorus or lions roaring in the wee hours. It is hard to comprehend the peace that descends after a few simple days of gazing at nature, and not only after a tall drink, clinking with ice at sundown. It is a natural salve from the noise and the unnecessary pressure we subject ourselves to in the city. Even children love it, despite having grown up with instant gratification, provided you are firm enough wean them off the screens for long enough to absorb the message. How much better to root your ecological learning on the hoof, in technicolor rather than in a classroom?

In addition to providing transformational holiday destinations, these vast natural landscapes are vital in the fight to preserve the biodiversity we have left and to halt the mass extinction that has taken place since man landed on the moon in 1969, when those astronauts first witnessed the illuminated magnificence of our blue planet from outer space. It took man’s removal from his environment to provide us with fresh perspective on how miraculous it is; to comprehend that we live in a biologically controlled ecosystem where everything is connected, which means it is vital that no further parts of us disappear. Environmental collapse doesn’t necessarily kill us. It creates and environment where we are incentivised to kill each other — even more than we are doing already.

These areas also provide enormous carbon sinks for controlling climate change and soaking up the damage created in the North. But protecting nature becomes infinitely more complex when you consider the communities that surround the protected areas and their history in these landscapes.

Bushbuckridge runs along the southwestern boundary of the Kruger Park. It is an informal settlement that contains a largely indigent population of 3.5-million people, a significant proportion of whom are unemployed. Many of them are descendants of people who occupied the land on which the park is now situated who were forcibly removed to establish the park. Others were relocated from other parts of SA during the establishment of the homelands. The high-density rural poverty that exists here is a direct result of apartheid-era policies. And as they say in the nature business, you can’t talk conservation to a hungry stomach — particularly when there is a plethora of bushmeat across the fence and increasingly less land in these communities to graze cattle or grow crops.

Any lasting solution to protect nature must be socioeconomically viable. Is it fair to ask communities who live on the edge of the Kruger to care about the fate of a rhino when their cattle are starving and they have no space to grow the crops required by a subsistence existence? We need to ensure that communities understand the value of nature and are able to benefit from it to the extent that we are all aligned to protect it.

The GLTFCA faces major threats from water pollution.  The lower Olifants River is polluted by discharges from mining activities around Phalaborwa, while the water security of the Blyde River (and many of the park’s other rivers) is threatened by the presence of alien trees in its catchment area in the Blyde River Canyon.  Zamazamas compound the issue by mining with mercury and cyanide. Waste and the threats to water quality from peri-urban settlements are not going away either. This ecosystem cannot function without clean water.

Other threats are widespread. There is a historical romance about Crooks Corner and the ivory smuggling on the wagon routes in the old days of Percy Fitzpatrick and his dog, Jock, but there is little romance in smuggling today. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime has reported that industrial amounts of contraband are being routed through here ranging from tonnes of heroin in a supply chain from Afghanistan, via Pakistani dhows and Mozambique, to rubies, gold, rhino horn, ivory and humans. Talk of evolution is cheap here. The less said about the military camp the better.

Fortunately, the cold and industrious North is willing to provide us with the funds and the expertise to fix these problems. They have already destroyed their natural assets in the process of building enormous economic wealth and need us to preserve our natural assets to keep our planet from burning up. Hence swaps are required. Development finance is in plentiful supply and highly educated, dedicated professionals in this field are focused on investing this money in the most effective way to preserve what remains in a rearguard action to save us from ourselves. Most of the funding provided to help us preserve our wilderness and the communities that surround them comes from the US and Europe.

Corporate and institutional regulations are changing in nature’s favour as clients and providers of capital become more aware of the damage being caused by human greed and the nonsense of ill-gotten dividends, which are net negative for our closed ecosystem. Corporates listed in the EU are being forced to disclose their impact on nature from 2025. Banks are being castigated for lending to businesses that harm the environment by increasingly virulent shareholders. This will disincentivise business practices that have a negative effect on the environment and encourage voluntarily offsetting using carbon credits or in projects that have the same effect.

Significant progress has been made in calculating the true value of nature as an economic asset and much more. So we can compare the positive environmental effects of areas such as these with an oilfield or an open caste mine. It doesn’t make sense that a hectare of desert in the Middle East with a river of oil flowing beneath it is worth more to humanity than a hectare of land in the Kruger Park. We must readjust our understanding of the Earth’s balance sheet accordingly. Natural areas that sequester carbon and keep our temperatures down must be paid to do so in carbon credits or using debt-for-nature swaps or other global financial transfers.

This can no longer be voluntary. This is our last decade and time is running out.

There are countless opportunities for business to invest in nature, but do we have the courage and the foresight to make investment decisions from which dividends will be reaped by our children rather than ourselves, where the returns may not be financial but the benefits will be infinite.

This is an appeal to corporates in SA to spend budget allocated for corporate social investment wisely. We implore you to move the conversation about conservation to the centre of the boardroom. And accept, finally, that further investment in ventures that harm our closed ecosystem are irresponsible and, arguably, insane.

• Brown is a consultant to Conservation International.