Getting biodiversity strategy right: What SA’s new action plan must deliver

The South African government has published a draft of the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for 2026-2035, setting out how the country is going to protect its natural resources over the next decade. But will this make the important distinction between an economy that depends on biodiversity and an economy that restores biodiversity?

Wikus Engelbrecht is a South African journalist and public relations professional specialising in conservation, biodiversity and sustainable food systems.

On 5 August the South African government quietly published a draft of its National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for 2026-2035 , a sweepingly consequential programme that sets out how the country will protect and manage its natural resources for the coming decade, and the nation’s primary instrument for actioning the international Convention on Biological Diversity .

Not a set of regulations in itself, the action plan, published under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act , will eventually guide policy and implementation, while the National Biodiversity Framework is the statutory mechanism intended to translate it into more operational biodiversity management. Taken together these are our three interconnected pillars for the thorny issue of biodiversity governance.

South Africa has an extraordinary natural inheritance. We are one of the world’s megadiverse countries, with more than 20,000 indigenous plant species in nine terrestrial biomes spanning 458 terrestrial ecosystem types, alongside 150 marine ecosystem types and hundreds of freshwater wetland and river classifications. With high levels of endemism, much of our biodiversity is irreplaceable.

Yet the latest National Biodiversity Assessment tells us something uncomfortable: almost half of our ecosystem types are threatened, while 16% of assessed plants and 10% of assessed animals are already threatened. Against this backdrop, the publication of South Africa’s new draft National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan deserves genuine public attention.

The draft recognises ecosystems, ecological integrity, connectivity, genetic diversity, invasive species, restoration, freshwater security and climate resilience as interconnected parts of the same system – and it explicitly calls for biodiversity to be integrated into decision-making across government and society.

The fact that biodiversity is being treated as something far bigger than a collection of charismatic animals is a positive direction. However, while the draft says many of the right things, South Africa cannot afford a biodiversity strategy in which economic utilisation becomes more measurable and better funded than actual conservation work and ecological recovery.

One of the most significant features of the draft is its emphasis on the “biodiversity economy”. The document proposes expanding value chains involving wildlife, bioprospecting (the systematic search for commercial value in nature), marine and freshwater resources, while increasing the gross domestic product contribution of the biodiversity economy by 10% by 2035.