Estate Living Magazine New Beginnings - Issue 37 January 2019 | Page 47

C o m m u n i t y
In Australia, single-family home owners are willing to pay a 3.4%
premium on houses that have visual access to privately owned
protected areas. In the USA, home owners in Colorado are
prepared to pay premium for plots in conservation developments
that communally protect large tracts of natural areas within the
property. These plots also sell faster than conventional plots. In South
Carolina, conservation developments carry a 39% premium. Across
the USA, 90% of home owners consider environmental features to
be important.
Willingness to pay is difficult to forecast, but it is increasingly evident
that natural areas and open spaces have a high attraction value for
home owners, and are also desirable to high-profile investors in the
business world.
What’s the big deal?
Many of the arguments for protecting and nurturing biodiversity
and natural habitats are well known. For a start, humans depend
completely on natural systems for their wellbeing and development.
At the most basic level, we couldn’t have water without rainfall and
flowing rivers, and we couldn’t have food without healthy soils to
grow plants, and pretty little insects to pollinate the flowers that
develop into fruit, vegetables and grains. On a more complex level,
healthy ecosystems help to stabilise the effects of droughts and
L i v i n g
floods, control disease and pests, store carbon, cycle nutrients,
purify water, and regulate air quality. They also provide raw materials
such as wild foods and medicine, offer habitat for biodiversity,
maintain genetic diversity, and are important for culture and leisure.
What’s it worth?
The goods and benefits that healthy ecosystems provide are called
ecosystem services, and they can be given a monetary value. There
is not yet a consistent and comprehensive economic valuation of all
South Africa’s ecosystems, but the studies done so far show that they
carry a very high monetary value. For example, a study published
in 2017 in the journal Ecosystem Services put the annual value
of the ecosystem services provided by South Africa’s terrestrial,
freshwater, and estuarine habitats at R275 billion.
When ecosystems become degraded, there can be far-reaching
implications for our economy. For a simplistic example, draining
and filling in a wetland directly reduces the quality of water flowing
into the local stream, and this eventually translates as a higher cost
for purifying the water that enters our taps, food production plants,
and breweries. In some cases degrading natural systems can have
international implications, for example if poor quality fresh water
reduces the health of estuaries and they can no longer function as
nurseries for wild fish, this can directly threaten the fish populations
that our neighbouring countries depend on for food.
So now what?
As our impact on natural areas grows, the ability of ecosystems to
provide the services we depend on declines. In addition, much of
the land that houses valuable ecosystems is outside of protected
areas. In Durban, for example, nearly a third of ecosystem hotspots,
or priority ecosystem service areas, are privately owned.
Rehana Dada
Thesen Islands
The one thing we can never get more of is wide-open space, so it’s
worth investing in, especially considering that the actual rands-and-
cents value of the services they provide are a boost to bottom line.
I
Although even the most conservation-conscious developments
cannot adequately substitute for pristine natural habitat, they can
contribute significantly to maintaining ecosystem services and
reducing fragmentation of natural areas, while improving the
desirability and sales potential of their developments.
If ecosystems within privately owned land are managed well, they
can continue to be functional. In addition to this, if they are protected,
rehabilitated where necessary, and incorporated innovatively
into estate design, they can provide a number of functions that
developers would otherwise have to build infrastructure to provide.