South Africa’s new environment minister is calling for an out-of-court settlement with conservation groups that earlier this year filed a case against his predecessor for not doing enough to protect plummeting populations of African penguins.
Dion George, who took office in July, made the announcement on Aug. 20 via his Democratic Alliance party, adding he wants to “secure the Penguin’s fish diet for years to come.”
“Continuing a court battle while penguins starve and their numbers decline would be counterproductive,” Andrew de Blocq Sheltinga, a DA spokesperson, said in a statement. “The actions by the Minister will support the recovery of this highly endangered and iconic species, which is endemic to Southern Africa.”
The lawsuit, filed in March by BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, centers on then-environment minister Barbara Creecy’s decision to implement fishing closures around penguin breeding colonies. The conservation groups say the closures are “biologically meaningless” in terms of safeguarding the bird’s food supply.
The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) has seen perilous population declines, from more than 1 million breeding pairs a century ago, to fewer than 15,000 breeding pairs in South Africa and Namibia. Recent declines are largely because of food shortage, especially sardines and anchovies, due to both competition with commercial fisheries and climate warming. Scientists say the penguin could become extinct by 2035 if the current trend continues. To secure the bird’s food stocks, fishing closures around its breeding colonies have been proposed as a solution.
However, negotiations between conservation groups and the fishing industry on the closure boundaries have repeatedly broken down. So in December 2022, Creecy appointed an independent panel of international experts to suggest boundaries that would benefit penguins while minimizing costs to the fishing industry. Despite the panel’s recommendations, Creecy announced in August 2023 that the government would extend existing interim closures until 2033.
“These so-called interim closures had been imposed while the panel was busy doing its analysis, and they’re not biologically meaningful at all,” Kate Handley, executive director of Cape Town-based nonprofit Biodiversity Law Centre, representing the conservation groups in their lawsuit, told Mongabay by phone.
Alistair McInnes, seabird conservationist at BirdLife South Africa, said the current closures “do not adequately reflect the most preferable foraging areas for African Penguins during the breeding season and in 4 of the 6 closures are less than or equal to only half their preferred foraging areas.”
The lawsuit names South Africa’s environment minister (Creecy at the time; George at present) as the first respondent and two fishing associations as additional respondents. It’s set to be heard in October.
Handley said George’s call to settle the case is encouraging. However, it’s still unclear how he proposes to correct the existing closures. “We have not yet received a favorable settlement proposal, and the litigation is, at this moment, ongoing,” Handley said.
Banner image of African penguins by Olga Ernst via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Credits
