Proceedings of the Workshop
on Water Requirements
for Lake St Lucia

RH Taylor (ed).

1993

Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. Pretoria

Introduction

With the recent transfer of a number of areas surrounding Lake St Lucia from the Department of Forestry to the Natal Parks Board, the body of the lake now lies within a public protected area known as the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park. Management of this expanded protected area, the third largest in South Africa, is the responsibility of the Natal Parks Board.

The lake is the key component of the park and the St Lucia Ecological and Technical Committee (SCADCO) is a committee appointed to advise the Natal Parks Board on the functioning and management of the lake system. Because the biological and hydrological processes of the lake system extend beyond the boundaries of the park, this advice is also chanelled to agencies such as the Department of Water Affairs, which plays an important role in managing the system outside the park.

The Board's primary management objectives for the park, including the lake, are to perpetuate the natural ecological processes in the system and to maintain maximum biodiversity within the system. Experience in South Africa has shown that protected areas surrounded by agricultural and urban areas require active management to counter inevitable deterioration fo the natural systems within the protected area. The Greater St Lucia Wetland Park is no exception to this rule and the Board needs to continue active management of the lake system. The lake has been subjected to a number of management actions over the years, including stabilization of the mobile coastal dunes near the estuary mouth using exotic trees, dredging of the estuary mouth itself, canalisation within the lake and between the lake and Umfolozi River and dam building at Mpempe Pan.

As part of the ongoing process of refining the database on which the management of the lake is based, SCADCO organised a two-day workshop at Fanies Island with the objective of specifying and quantifying the minimum water requirements of the lake system. This document is the result of that workshop.

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	This page is maintained by the South African Wetlands Conservation Programme and was last updated on 12 January 1999.

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