WHERE
GAUTENG PROVINCE spans 18,176 km², with one ambulance per 10,700 people. Yet wildlife faces coping with just one response vehicle per 8.3 million animals - or one per 9,500 admitted emergency cases, annually.
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach. - Henry Beston
AREA OF OPERATION.
The Gauteng Province
Conservation regulations
The environment
South Africa is classified as one of the 12 megabiodiverse countries" on Earth. Gauteng Province spans 18176km2 and according to IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) estimates is home to approximately 90 to 100 million wild vertebrates. The official number of species totals 720. The most industrial and densely populated Province at the same time contains the city with the largest urban man-made forest in the world. This clarifies three key motivations to conserve biodiversity: 1. Out of the entire continent, expertise in urban conservation is best concentrated here first; 2. The most damage to the country's small, adaptable species can be averted here; 3. The most people not educated in or having not adopted sustainability can be accessed here.
Each Province regulates the nature conservation activities within their respective jurisdiction under the national laws (The National Environmental Management Act) and their own "Ordinance" regulations.
Gauteng, South Africa’s smallest province, sits within the grassland biome, characterised by rolling highveld plains, seasonal wetlands, rocky ridges, and scattered patches of indigenous bush. It supports a high diversity of birdlife, small mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates, especially in remnant riparian corridors and ridgelines. However, Gauteng is also the most urbanised and densely populated province, with more than 97% of its area modified or fragmented by infrastructure, mining, agriculture, and urban sprawl. Natural ecosystems are now isolated in patches — vulnerable to degradation, pollution, and species displacement. This sharp contrast between rich ecological potential and extreme anthropogenic pressure makes Gauteng a focal point for urban conservation, demanding innovative approaches to restore ecological function and enable coexistence between biodiversity and human development.
