The broad aim of the project is to develop municipal environmental profiles for 44 District Municipalities in order to support municipalities to achieve their core mandate with respect to environmental sustainability. 

 

The project goals are as follows: 

• To get district representation of environmental information in a graphic, spatial, narrative format designed to make the data easily understandable and usable;

• To assemble environmental information for ease of use by municipalities during the planning phases;

• To develop an integrated support plan per district informed by the status on the environmental profile;

• To initiate a monitoring and evaluation tool for environmental performance at local government.

 

The profiles will enable the environmental sector to have a comprehensive diagnosis of environmental issues in municipalities.  The benefits of the projects are as follows:

• Assist municipalities to better understand their environmental profile;

• Provide municipalities with easily accessible data to enhance environmental analysis in the IDP and other related municipal planning tools;

• Provide ready-made data and statistics to feed into State of Environment Reporting;

• Assist municipalities and the environment sector in developing appropriate environmental interventions;

• Assist municipalities in identifying other environmental management tools they may need to develop (EMF, Environmental Policy, By-laws etc.);

• Enable improved monitoring, reporting and evaluation of environmental support initiatives;

• Enable municipalities to start collecting data (where possible/appropriate) for updating their environmental profiles and for mainstreaming this data into other planning tools at national, provincial and local level;

• The profiles and the data made available will be used by the relevant parties / end-users for land use planning, decision making and reporting.

 

The development of the Environmental Profiles in 44 District Municipalities were done for the following thematic areas, namely: Biodiversity, Waste management, Climate risk and vulnerability, Air quality, Environmental Governance and Job opportunities created on environmental community works / Environmental Protection and Infrastructure programmes (EPIP). The thematic areas were selected based on the data availability and accessibility.  The development of the profiles entailed data gathering, processing, analysis, and presentation of information in a user friendly version.

For each of the above thematic areas provided, the 44 District municipalities were profiled as follows:

 

• A spatial representation of the environmental aspects;

• Statistical information analysis and context of some environmental aspects;

• A narrative that briefly describes what has been presented in the map and the statistics; and

• A Five (5) year Integrated Support Plan (ISP) for each municipality by collating intervention / activities as listed under ‘proposed responses’ for each aspect. The ISP should highlight role players, time frames, estimated costs and indicators (compliance and performance) and will form part of the Environmental Management Plans for each Municipality;

• A reporting template was used to gather information and to link the profiles for municipalities who should report on the template twice a year, for monitoring of the environmental performance. The template should be web-based.