Cooperation with South Africa

Our partner in South Africa is the country’s equivalent of the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (SwAM), the Oceans and Coasts Branch, which is part of the country’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. The cooperation has been ongoing since 2015.

Marine spatial planning

Both Sweden and South Africa undertake marine spatial planning. The countries are at different stages in their national processes and approach some aspects of planning in different ways. This provides opportunities for us to learn from each other.

One area of cooperation is sharing experiences on how authorities can develop inclusive and effective stakeholder engagement processes. Another is developing high-quality impact assessments of environmental and socio-economic impacts.

As part of this work, SwAM, together with South Africa and other countries in the region, developed a regional version of the Swedish marine spatial planning tool Symphony, which assesses cumulative environmental impacts. The regional tool WIO Symphony was launched in 2022.

Today, the tool is managed by the Nairobi Convention, through which countries in the Western Indian Ocean region cooperate to conserve, manage and sustainably use the region’s marine and coastal environment.

Source-to-sea management

Together with South Africa, we work to strengthen our shared knowledge and national implementation of holistic water management, also known as source-to-sea management. By exchanging experiences and developing new knowledge, we can improve our understanding of how activities on land and upstream affect coastal areas and the ocean.

Between 2019 and 2022, we supported South Africa’s efforts to reduce the amount of plastic entering the ocean. We focused on plastic pollution that originates further inland, is carried through South Africa’s major rivers and ultimately reaches the ocean. Together with the Oceans and Coasts Branch, we developed a series of studies mapping plastic flows, management practices and the socio-economic costs of plastic pollution in the lower reaches of the uMgeni River in KwaZulu-Natal province.