Cape Town - The combination of illegal species collection, long-term climate change-related droughts, and ongoing land degradation was creating a devastating perfect storm causing unprecedented loss of biodiversity in South Africa.
These were the sentiments of the SA National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi), after an alert that 210 new species of succulents were listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species for the first time, as a result of these combined threats.
It revealed the shocking collapse of South Africa’s wild succulent plant populations. Previously, these succulent species were not assessed on the IUCN Red List, however, they were included on South Africa’s National Red List.
These species were part of the Succulent Karoo biome shared between South Africa and Namibia – one of five semi-arid, biodiversity hot spots in the world, and rich in botanical diversity.
Sanbi spokesperson Nontsikelelo Mpulo said: “The majority of these species belong to the genus Conophytum, a large and diverse group of dwarf succulents commonly known as ‘buttons’. A total of 97% of the genus is listed in one of the three threatened categories, while 45% are listed in the highest category as critically endangered.”
Mpulo said South Africa’s succulent plants were experiencing unprecedented rates of decline due to combined impacts of climate change and illegal collecting to supply a growing ornamental trade in succulent plants.
“Since the year 2019, there has been a rapid rise in the global demand for collectable plants exceedingly driven by emerging markets across Asia,” Mpulo said.
Mpulo added that social media sites were providing the ideal platforms to market succulent plants, and fuelled the growth in illegal trade as many of these in-demand plant species were not yet available for commercial scale.
Stellenbosch University (SU) climate change and biodiversity professor Guy Midgley said plant collection has been intensifying for many years and, left unchecked, it would cause more problems for the state of the country’s biodiversity. “The monitoring of the vast areas (where the succulents occurred) is expensive and time consuming,” Midgley said.
SU conservation ecology and entomology professor Karen Esler said often these unique species were confined to a single hill, slope or habitat, so if they got poached, there was a high chance of extinction of an entire species. Even if some individual plants are left behind, population viability was threatened.
