WATCH: Thousands of hectares of invasive pine trees are being painstakingly removed to ease Cape Town’s climate-induced water shortages
The crews are there to help to remove 54,000 hectares of alien trees by 2025, in the process reclaiming an estimated 55 billion litres of water lost each year - two months water supply for Cape Town.
"We can't eradicate the pines, but we've got to manage and control them because the scale is too big. It's a massive problem," said Louise Stafford, South Africa's programme director at The Nature Conservancy, an NGO leading the process. Pine trees, first introduced from Europe during the 17th century, are now the backbone of South Africa's commercial forestry industry. But their small seeds are easily dispersed by the wind and, with no natural enemies, they can spread rapidly from plantations to protected nature reserves, scientists said.An invasive pine sapling sits amongst indigenous vegetation above Caledon near Cape Town, South Africa, October 12, 2021.
"Out of the five sites we are monitoring, three no longer have any frogs. If we do not remove this carpet of pine trees there is no doubt the frogs will become extinct," John Measey, a zoologist at Stellenbosch University's Centre for Invasion Biology, said.
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