One Map, Three Claims on South Africa’s Land

South Africa has built a single map for three land uses that have been planned as though they sat on separate ones. The Endangered Wildlife Trust released its Landscape Planning Tool on November 7, an interactive web application that shows planners, government departments and developers where conservation, renewable energy and farmland can each go with the least collision between them.

The problem it addresses is arithmetic. South Africa has committed, under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to bring 30 percent of its land and ocean under effective conservation management by 2030, and the EWT puts the current figure at roughly 15 percent. The Integrated Resource Plan 2025 calls for about 34 gigawatts of new wind capacity and 25 gigawatts of new solar by 2039, with 14,000 kilometers of new transmission infrastructure to carry it. The National Development Plan wants close to a million new agricultural jobs by 2030, underpinned by a planned 500,000 hectare expansion of irrigated land.

Why can these three not just be planned separately?

Because they are competing for the same ground, and the overlap is not random. Renewable energy infrastructure is increasingly sited in areas that overlap Critical Biodiversity Areas and Ecological Support Areas, the two categories South African provincial plans use to flag land that matters most for species and for the natural processes around them. Agricultural expansion, meanwhile, concentrates in regions where biodiversity sensitivity is often highest. The conservation target therefore has to be met on land that two other national priorities already want.

Left alone, the EWT argues, that collision produces the worst of all three outcomes at once: degraded habitat and lost species, delayed energy infrastructure, and agricultural potential that never materializes.

What the tool actually does

It applies systematic conservation planning, a method that treats land allocation as a single optimization problem rather than a series of separate decisions. Instead of asking whether one site is good for solar, it asks where every unit of land in the country should go so that the full set of national targets is met at the lowest total cost in conflict. That is a different question, and it can only be asked once all three sectors are on one map.

The tool draws on more than 50 spatial data layers per land use zone. They span biodiversity importance, land cover, wind and solar resource, grid and transmission infrastructure, and socioeconomic factors, and they are resolved into planning units at national level and separately for all nine provinces.

What keeps it from being a single fixed answer handed down to planners is that the user sets the parameters. You can define your own area of interest, choose your own targets for how much land goes to each use, and watch the trade-offs resolve on an interactive map. The methodology is documented openly rather than sealed inside the application, which matters for a tool whose output is an argument about where a wind farm should not go.

Dr Oliver Cowan, the project lead, put the case for a shared map directly.

“South Africa cannot afford to address these as though they exist on different maps. They exist on the same map, and the Landscape Planning Tool gives us, for the first time, a shared and transparent way to plan them together.”

The tool is publicly accessible, which is the part that makes a result checkable by anyone who disagrees with it.

Which zoos paid for this?

None that we could find, and the honest version of that sentence is worth more than a forced connection. The EWT names a single funder for the Landscape Planning Tool: the JRS Biodiversity Foundation, a private grant-maker that supports biodiversity data and information work in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not a zoo, an aquarium or a zoological society, and we could not verify support from any accredited zoological institution for this particular piece of work.

That is a different answer from the one the same organization’s crane work produced, where the partner turned out to be the International Crane Foundation, an AZA-accredited institution in its own right. The trace runs per project rather than per organization, and on this project it comes back empty.

One correction, and it is a small one

The EWT’s announcement cites the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Act as protecting 24 million hectares of high-value agricultural land. Two details are worth stating precisely. The act is real and correctly numbered: Act 39 of 2024, assented to on December 20, 2024 and published in the Government Gazette on January 29, 2025. The South African government’s own listing, however, records its commencement as “to be proclaimed,” so this is law that has not yet been brought into force. And the 24 million hectare figure does not appear in the act, whose relevant wording is that “high value agricultural land is a scarce and nonrenewable resource.” The hectares are the EWT’s estimate of the scope rather than the statute’s number.

Neither point weakens the underlying case. A statute waiting on proclamation still says where national policy is heading, and a tool built to show three sectors the cost of ignoring each other is useful whether or not that act has commenced.