This work has been commissioned by the UK Department for International Development on behalf of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. The target audience include forest scientists, managers, conservationists, regulators, and administrators involved with indigenous forests in South Africa.

The aim of conservation planning is the selection of priority planning units for conservation action. Conservation is not just about preserving biodiversity, it is also about the sustainable use of natural resources. Many valuable forested areas in South Africa are associated with communities who may be heavily or partially reliant on these forest resources. In this regard, there is an urgent need to implement the principles of community-based natural resource management as part of a forest conservation strategy and action plan.

This study used both forest patches and forest clusters as planning units. What is becoming increasingly apparent is the critical role that conservation planning needs to play in the maintenance of connectivity between increasingly fragmented forest patches. The use of forest patches as planning units has enabled important habitat patches to be identified while the use of clusters as planning units identified whole forested regions as priority areas, thus emphasising the need for planning to done at the broader landscape level. Critical habitat units need to be evaluated not just for their contribution to the biodiversity representivity targets, but also for their role in maintaining natural habitat pathways and ecological connectivity.

The planning and implementation of conservation of the forest biome provides a unique challenge, given the large number of administrative boundaries that fall within the planning domain. This implies the need for national level co-ordination and planning, specifically entailing the setting of national conservation targets, protected area gap analysis, and the identification of priority forests for conservation action. National-level planning is thus essential for providing a framework for finer scale planning necessary at provincial and local level, as well as facilitating integration with bioregional and spatial development framework planning.

Never has the urgency been greater to implement forest conservation planning. Land use pressures and demands for forest resources are on the increase, resulting in deforestation, degradation and fragmentation of irreplaceable habitats.

Forests are valued for many different reasons, of which, biodiversity is only one. Although occupying less than 0.4% of the surface area of South Africa, forests have the highest biodiversity per unit area of any biome in South Africa. It is also the most vulnerable, smallest and most fragmented biome. In addition, it is facing escalating pressure from strip mining, coastal and urban development, agriculture, illegal commercial and subsistence over-harvesting.

Systematic conservation planning for the forest biome of South Africa National government needs to play a key role in speeding up the implementation of conservation planning. One of the major blocks to implementation is lack of capacity and information necessary to ensure co-ordinated conservation action at different levels of government.

In theory, all forests are protected under the National Forests Act No. 84 of 1998 (NFA). However, only relatively few state forests are actually managed as protected areas. Almost all of the national forest types assessed fall well short of the national conservation targets set for strict protection and, given current and predicted levels of threat, there is an urgent need to increase the number of (statutory) forest protected areas in South Africa.

Forests play important roles in providing ecosystem services such as water retention, water purification, flood attenuation and carbon sequestration, all necessary for maintenance of healthy environments for human habitation. Because of this, all forests can be considered as having ‘high conservation value’. However, given the multiple demands on forest resources, not all forests can be set aside for strict biodiversity conservation.

One of the key outputs of this conservation planning project was identification of priority forests for conservation. This was done, independently at both the level of forest patch and forest clusters, using computer optimisation algorithms. Prioritisation was based on irreplaceability, threat, and livelihood analysis. C-plan was used for forest patch irreplaceability analysis, while Marxan was used for cluster analysis.

Internationally, South African forests can also claim global importance. Despite sharing more affinities with Afro-tropical forests, their position relative to the Equator qualifies them as  ‘temperate forests’. Recent research has shown that South African forest have the highest biodiversity of any temperate forested region in the world.

Impressive as this may seem, it is unlikely to mean much to those whose livelihoods depended on the continual use of forests resources. In many areas forest are considered as a ‘safety net’ for the rural poor, as well as playing an important role in the spiritual, cultural and herbal-medicinal systems of rural communities. This study has realised the importance of addressing the socioeconomic opportunities and constrains inherent in conservation planning. While no claim can be made to providing answers to the many complex issues of rural poverty and conservation, the computer tools developed  will at least provide support for informed decision making.