BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) have initiated legal action against the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Barbara Creecy.
They want the Minister to review and set aside the closures to fishing around key African Penguin breeding colonies.
On 19 March 2024,the litigation was initiated at the Pretoria High Court, in the interests of Africa’s only penguin species: the Endangered African Penguin (Spheniscus demersus), SANCCOB, said in a statement.
Kate Handley, Executive Director of the Biodiversity Law Centre, says: “This is the first litigation in South Africa invoking the Minister’s constitutional obligation to prevent extinction of an endangered species. It follows her failure, since at least 2018, to implement biologically meaningful closures around African Penguin breeding areas, despite scientific evidence that such closures improve the species access to their critical sardine and anchovy food source, thereby contributing towards arresting the decline of the African Penguin.”
The African Penguin has lost 97% of its population. If current trends persist, the species will be extinct in the wild by 2035.
Dr Alistair McInnes, Seabird Conservation Manager at BirdLife South Africa, says: “The African Penguin’s survival depends on the right decision being taken now. African Penguins at breeding colonies need access to food. Our challenge seeks to have the Minister take science-based decisions that are grounded on the internationally recognised and constitutionally enshrined precautionary principle. This is something that the Minister has consistently failed to do since 2018, notwithstanding having called multiple reviews.”
The African Penguin faces extinction in the wild by 2035, if more is not done to curb the current rate of population decline.
The crisis is driven primarily by their lack of access to prey, for which they must compete with the commercial purse-seine fishery which continues to catch sardine and anchovy in the waters surrounding the six largest African Penguin breeding colonies. Critically, these six colonies are home to an estimated 90% of South Africa’s African Penguins.
Dr Katta Ludynia, Research Manager at SANCCOB, says: “The Minister was selective about which recommendations she followed. Inexplicably, she failed to follow the critical recommendation regarding how closures should be delineated. Instead, the Minister decided to extend the meaningless interim closures, unless agreement between the conservation sector and the fishing industry could be reached on an alternative.”
Ludynia said the African Penguin population in South Africa, has plummeted from 27,151 breeding pairs in 2008, to 15,187 breeding pairs, when the results of the experiment were first published and peer-reviewed, and now to only an estimated 8,750 breeding pairs.
She attributed the decline of breeding pairs, to the Minister’s failure to act. “Biologically meaningless closures are now in place until December 2033 – just more than a year from the possible extinction date of 2035” she said.
Picture : Save the African penguin