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This product is intended to help guide land-use planning, environmental assessments and authorisations; and, natural resource management in order to promote development which occurs in a sustainable manner. It has been developed to further the awareness of the unique biodiversity in the area, the value this biodiversity represents to people as well as the management mechanisms that can ensure its protection and sustainable utilisation.

The CBA maps were created with three main land-use planning and decision-makin avenues in mind:

1) Reactive decision-making, such as environmental impact assessment (EIA agricultural land-use decisions, water-use licensing and other development contro decisions through the Land Use Planning Ordinance (LUPO) or other land-us legislation,

2) Proactive forward planning, such as Integrated Development Plans (IDP’s), Spatia Development Frameworks (SDF’s) & Zoning Schemes, and

Proactive conservation, such as stewardship, land acquisition & easements.

Copyright holder: Botanical Society of South Africa

Once the land management objectives and CBA categories had been defined a set of criteria were developed in order to asses and categorise the available biodiversity information into CBA categories. The criteria have drawn on the experiences of other similar exercise in South Africa and have been adapted to the available biodiversity information.

The overall CBA map at the provincial scale is derived from overlaying multiple biodiversity information layers (viz. criteria) and then summarising the CBA category classification for all areas in the landscape with the highest ranking CBA category taking precedent for display in the final map. Therefore any point or area in the landscape can be classified as a CBA based on one or many biodiversity criteria (biodiversity information layers) and can have multiple CBA categories (e.g. CBA1 and ESA).

The biodiversity criteria used to define the CBA’s draws from experiences with similar exercises elsewhere in South Africa (Table 1), existing biodiversity conservation studies as well as from discussions with stakeholders and experts during the development of the CBA map. Most importantly, the CBA categories presented here follow the national recommendations presented in the ‘Guideline Regarding the Determination of Bioregions and the Preparation and Publication of Bioregional Plans’ (Anon 2008).

Terrestrial and aquatic CBA’s are presented in separate maps partly for clarity and partly because the land use guideline recommendations for terrestrial and aquatic CBA’s can differ.

SANS 1878

FGDC-STD-001-1998