The Democratic Alliance (DA) in Vosburg, in Kareeberg municipality, is helping to preserve the town’s groundwater by clearing invasive Prosopis trees.
Prosopis trees have been found to cause a significant decline in borehole water. A single tree can abstract 2,000 liters of water in a day. That means that a thicket of 1,000 trees can have a water uptake of 2 million liters of water, depleting entire water sources.
When the trees get big, they can spread up to 105,000 seeds a year on average, propagating thousands of trees. If left unattended, this will create an uncontrollable problem in about ten years’ time.
Failure by local and provincial government to adequately control the spread of the water intensive trees has negatively impacted on water supply in towns that are dependent on groundwater, such as Van Wyksvlei, where boreholes have dried up. In Britstown, there are certain areas that cannot be farmed anymore because of Prosopis induced water shortages. Carnarvon’s invasive tree population is also starting to generate water problems.
The DA is running the project to ensure that the same doesn’t happen to Vosburg. So far this week, approximately 1,300 small trees have been cleared around boreholes.
Earlier this year, through funding received from Lotto Land’s “Help ‘n Dorp” project, my team and I further cleared more than 5,000 trees, over a six-week period.
While eradicating Prosopis trees requires a whole-of-society approach, it requires local and provincial government to ensure that there is adequate expansion of the project, to protect increasingly scarce groundwater sources in the arid areas of the Northern Cape.
The DA has referred the matter to the Northern Cape Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs, calling on them to urgently expand initiatives to clear Prosopis trees across the province and ensure that an intergovernmental approach is followed.
People’s right to access to clean water must be protected through the preservation of all existing water sources.