Verlorenvlei under threat as developers eye this gem of the West Coast
First published in Daily Maverick on 22 October 2025
A plethora of development applications for residential estates, powerlines and the rectification of unlawfully built dams around Verlorenvlei exclude local communities from the very decisions that stand to affect the vlei.
The Verlorenvlei estuary, a Ramsar wetland of international importance and the lifeblood of West Coast communities, faces mounting pressures from development and resource use.
Yet decisions that shape the estuary’s future are too often made without the voices of those who depend on it most. Genuine public participation – particularly the inclusion of marginalised and historically excluded communities – is not a procedural box to be ticked, but a cornerstone of equitable and sustainable development.
In the case of Verlorenvlei, such inclusivity is also a test of whether South Africa’s environmental governance can live up to its constitutional promise of participatory democracy.
Public participation in environmental decision-making is the means to find out the needs and values of people who will be affected by or have interests in these decisions, including industries, NGOs and local communities, and to understand how these decisions will impact them all.
Just by virtue of living in and depending on a certain environment, local communities – especially indigenous people – have unique relationships with, and insights into, its plants, animals, insects, land, water and air.
They may also have customary law that regulates their relationship to the environment, and deeply meaningful ways of life that sustain nature through its ebbs and flows. The importance of integrating their knowledge into environmental decision-making cannot be overlooked.
Yet South Africa’s jurisprudence is littered with examples of failures to ensure meaningful public participation – or to have any such processes at all.
The Sustaining the Wild Coast matter is a prime example. This case, which was recently heard on appeal by the Constitutional Court, concerns the granting and renewals of an exploration right to explore for oil and gas along the Eastern Cape coast.
The case highlighted the exclusion of marginalised people – rural Mpondo and Xhosa communities without email or internet access – from the public participation processes that informed the decision to permit exploration.
This was despite the exploration right’s potential to harm coastal livelihoods, disrupt fishing and cultural and religious practices, and undermine communities’ customary fishing rights and obligations to care for their environment.
Failure to ensure adequate public participation and to embed the lived experience and cultural values of local communities in environmental decision-making risks decisions that do not achieve the constitutional imperative of ecologically sustainable development.
Lip service
We have witnessed these shortcomings as we seek to use environmental law to protect Verlorenvlei. Indeed, without inclusive public participation, environmental regulation can exclude marginalised communities, thereby excluding their views on the state of the vlei, its utilities and threats, and weakening the regulation’s accuracy and, ultimately, its ability to protect the environment.
Despite legislation such as the National Environmental Management Act (Nema) recognising the value of involving local communities in environmental management, we have seen first-hand how a plethora of development applications for residential estates, powerlines and the rectification of unlawfully constructed dams around Verlorenvlei exclude local communities from the very decisions that stand to affect the vlei and its surrounding environment.
These public participation processes pay lip service to the importance of meaningful local engagement. Characterised by written notices published in newspapers, lengthy emailed environmental impact assessment (EIA) documents and public meetings held in only certain towns, these superficial efforts at engagement consistently exclude people unable to participate due to work-related commitments, disability, a lack of transport or funds, or the fact that they have been kept wholly ignorant of the engagements taking place.
These deficiencies are not particular to EIA processes for proposed developments – they permeate environmental policies and conservation measures as well.
Nema’s regard for the involvement of local communities, particularly marginalised people, is reflected in certain of the Western Cape’s own environmental policies.
In environmental authorisation processes, these policies require flexible participation measures such as engaging existing community structures, holding accessible meetings and building participatory capacity – especially where developments raise public concern or affect disadvantaged, illiterate or disabled people.
Given that the municipalities of the two small towns near the vlei, Redelinghuys and Elands Bay, have relatively low literacy rates, with the former’s being “especially low for the coloured population (52.5%)” according to its 2022 Integrated Development Plan, it becomes especially important to tailor public participation processes to cater to local stakeholder needs.
Nature reserve
The Biodiversity Law Centre has long advocated for the declaration of Verlorenvlei as a nature reserve under the National Environmental Management: Protected Areas Act.
Such a declaration would restrict pollution and disturbances of species in the heavily threatened and degrading estuary and increase resources towards its restoration.
We have also learnt first-hand of the deep connection between the Elands Bay community and the vlei. A local resident shared how young fishers have long begun their livelihoods in the sheltered waters of the vlei before venturing to the ocean – a tradition now curtailed by certain landowners who have restricted access along Verlorenvlei’s shores.
Going forward, we will look to ensure that any public participation process engages marginalised locals about their lived experiences of Verlorenvlei and to incorporate their testimonies in decisions regarding the declaration of a nature reserve, and in its subsequent management.
Failing to meaningfully engage local communities is not only inherently problematic in the context of developers’ public participation, depriving communities of the right to participate in decisions that affect them, but it exposes would-be developers to the risk of their authorisations being overturned.
Lack of meaningful public participation with local communities and failures to consider their cultural and spiritual rights and customary law undermines the legitimacy of environmental decision-making.
Finally, in the context of severely constrained state budgets, problems like lack of capacity for environmental protection can be alleviated by local community involvement and stewardship.
People who live closest to ecosystems like Verlorenvlei possess deep, place-based knowledge about local species, seasonal changes and resource-use patterns that cannot be replicated by distant authorities.
When they are meaningfully included in environmental governance, communities can help identify threats early, monitor compliance and ensure that conservation measures are grounded in social realities.
Where the state and even environmental NGOs fail to meaningfully engage communities in developing policies and taking measures that seek to protect the environment, they can undermine their own well-intentioned efforts to the detriment of the very environment on which we all depend and seek to defend.
For now, we must remember that protecting Verlorenvlei is not only about safeguarding its waters and tributaries upstream – it is also about meaningfully engaging the “upstream” communities whose lives, knowledge and stewardship are essential to its survival.