History of the RHP to date
The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) initiated the formal design of the RHP in 1994. The main purpose was that the programme should serve as a source of information regarding the overall ecological status of river ecosystems in South Africa. For this reason, the RHP primarily makes use of in-stream and riparian biological communities (e.g. fish, invertebrates, vegetation) to characterise the response of the aquatic environment to multiple disturbances. The rationale is that the integrity or health of the biota inhabiting the river ecosystems provides a direct and integrated measure of the health of the river as a whole.
A phased approach was adopted for the design of the monitoring programme, to facilitate:
Formulation of a design framework: A needs analysis was done involving local resource managers and scientists as well as international benchmarking. This exercise allowed the setting of programme objectives as well as the scope and specifications for guiding the rest of the design phases.
Conceptual development of the programme within the design framework: This phase dealt with selecting and/or developing technical protocols, for example to select monitoring sites and ecological indices, deciding on monitoring frequency and creating systems for the management of data and information.
Small-scale implementation to test and demonstrate the programme: It was shown that information from the programme provide a substantial broadening of the conventional water quality monitoring and assessment focus. This monitoring tool is ideally geared to serve state-of-environment reporting (e.g. Brochure on State of the Crocodile River, 1998). The availability of qualitative and quantitative information on ecological reference conditions as well as the present ecological state of a river contributes to the process of determining an ecological reserve for rivers.
Anchor the RHP so that it becomes part of "the way we do things around here": This phase is to ensure that the RHP becomes part of the relevant water management institutions in terms of required expertise, skills and budgets. The overall goal of the Anchoring Phase is to help implementation agencies to go through the different steps of implementing the programme as well as to internalise the programme into their organisations.
The RHP currently
The South African National Water Act (NWA) came into effect in 1998, four years after the initiation of the RHP. The Act acknowledges the importance of protecting aquatic ecosystems in maintaining the full suite of goods and services that people rely on for their livelihoods, and requires that a national aquatic ecosystem health monitoring system be established. To date, the implementation of the RHP has largely been driven by provincial implementation teams consisting of amongst others, DWAF Regional Offices, provincial departments of the environment, conservation agencies, universities and municipalities. Implementation in the provinces has largely been voluntary and is influenced by various factors such as the enthusiasm of provincial champions and provincial task teams, buy-in from their respective organisations, as well as the availability of financial and human resources. This makes the Programme very vulnerable and affects the long-term sustainability of the Programme.
DWAF as a result initiated the ’National Coverage Phase’. The main purpose of this phase is to formalize the Programme, to establish the RHP as a national programme and to align the design of the Programme with the requirements of the NWA.
The main components of this phase include:
Reviewing and revising the current design of the programme to ensure that it is aligned with DWAF’s Strategic Framework for National Water Resource Quality Monitoring Programmes and the National Water Act (Act 36 of 1998);
Determining the Programme’s operational requirements;
Refining the Rivers Database;
Further development and establishment of Quality Assurance procedures;
Revising the Biomonitoring short course;
Ongoing R&D (e.g. the development of a wetlands habitat integrity index, fish reference conditions, vegetation response assessment index).
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