A historic project to integrate conservation and development on the Wild Coast has been launched by Bisho and the Wilderness Foundation.

The Wild Coast Conservation and Sustainable Development Project is being bankrolled by a R7million budget, with R3 million coming from the Eastern Cape economic affairs, environment and tourism department, and the other half from the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the UN Development Programme.

The million-dollar question is whether the project will affect the twin development controversies in Pondoland.

These are an application by the national roads agency to build a toll road through a local botanical hotspot, and the mineral and energy department’s approval of a preliminary “mineral rights” application by an Australian company interested in mining the Xolobeni dunes.

The project team will be pitching for a further R36 to R48-million from the Global Environment Facility to implement an action plan that will flow from the project.

The plan will be “a proactive vision” for the region to facilitate the best use of natural resources and avoid conflict in the future over different land use proposals.

Project manager James Jackelman said yesterday that the intention was to build on the 1997 spatial development initiative.

The SDI also sought to establish a common vision for the region but failed to do so, possibly because it was driven by the national government, not by provincial and local authorities.

The new project would seek to include existing planning by local and district municipalities.

“Our project has a conservation bias but conservation cannot operate in isolation so we have looked past traditional conservation to its wider integration.”

Jackelman had no immediate answers about Pondoland. “When similar projects have been undertaken elsewhere in the country, there have been calls for a moratorium on development until the completion of the project, but I don’t think this has ever happened.

“The reason why there has been so much controversy over these two issues is perhaps because there hasn’t been a common vision – and this is what we want to provide. We are trying to move from reactive to proactive.”

The project is being approached in the same way as the milestone University of Port Elizabeth Step programme launched three years ago and still under way to protect and find the best use for the thicket veld in the western region of the province.

The economic affairs, environment and tourism department and the Wilderness Foundation are tackling the Wild Coast project as partners.

A representative of the department chairs the project’s steering committee, which includes officials from all State departments and institutions in the area.

Asked about the implications of the project for the mining proposal, mineral and energy regional director Nomvuyo Ketse said her department was aware of it and was in discussion with the project team.