African Wildlife & Environment Issue 85

CONSERVATION

‘retrain’ into other fields if they wanted to continue earning a living. Few chose to do so, and, in one famous case, a global-authority on diatoms dumped his life’s work in the garbage and declined to retool himself in ‘waste management.’ In an attempt to compensate for the loss of state-funded research, a limited amount of applied lake management, research and monitoring was undertaken by some of the larger local authorities

Cyanobacterial bloom in Hartbeespoort Dam embayment

Hartbeespoort dam signage

Hartbeespoort Dam outflow

and Water Boards. The focus of this work was born of a need for the water utilities to proactively understand and manage the nature of the water resources being treated and supplied to consumers. The requirement for effective early-warning protocols for toxin-producing cyanobacterial blooms is a case in point: An example of these efforts was the establishment of a dedicated cyanotoxin laboratory, the only one in Africa, by the City of Cape Town in 1992. The City Engineer, the late Arthur Clayton, told this writer that he ‘wanted to know about the presence of algal toxins before he read about it in the press’. However, despite these limited

Microcystis bloom, Hartbeespoort Dam

efforts, the bulk of the smaller water providers were, and still are, left completely unsupported. Negligible funding was made available for reservoir studies after 1990. An examination of Water Research Commission projects shows that up until 2015 a mere ZAR10 Million (~USD 1 million) was spent on six projects, this being both a fraction of the Commission’s overall budget in general, or that

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