Settlement reached in African Penguin case

Conservationists argued that current no-fishing zones are inadequate to prevent the African Penguin’s extinction. Archive photo: John Yeld

• The government, seabird conservation groups and the pelagic fishing industry have reached a settlement agreement in a High Court case.
• The agreement includes significant changes to no-fishing zones around several African Penguin breeding islands.
• Previously declared closures were insufficient to protect penguin breeding grounds, environmental groups argued.
• African Penguins, endemic to South Africa and Namibia, are critically endangered.

The government, seabird conservation groups and the pelagic fishing industry have reached an agreement over fishing restrictions around six critical penguin breeding islands.

The African Penguin population – a species endemic to the South African and Namibian coastline – has crashed in recent decades and, without intervention, is predicted to become extinct in the wild by as early as 2035.

The “in principle” settlement agreement, announced on Wednesday by Forestry, Fisheries and Environment Minister Dion George, appears to have staved off a major legal challenge by conservationists that was set down to be heard in the Pretoria High Court over three days next week.

The agreement, which still needs to be made an order of the court, includes significant changes to the current closures of penguin feeding grounds that prohibit fishing vessels targeting the same species - sardines and anchovies - from fishing in the area.

The applicants in the court case – non-profit conservation organisations BirdLife South Africa and the South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) – had argued that the island closures currently in place were “biologically meaningless” and did not adequately protect the penguins’ food source. They went to court to have a new closure system implemented.

BirdLife South Africa and SANCCOB had not responded publicly to George’s statement at the time of publication.

New island closures

George said in his statement that the “historic settlement agreement reached in principle…aligns perfectly with the Department’s long-standing vision for collaborative conservation”.

He said that he had initially requested a meeting with all parties without their legal representatives being present, but that only the fishing industry had accepted this condition.

He then requested a second meeting where the parties could bring their legal representatives, and this time they’d agreed. At this meeting, he announced the establishment of a working group to seek consensus on the island closures to the benefit of the now critically endangered penguin species. The settlement was reached independently by the parties involved in the litigation.

The new agreement includes the following island closures:

• St Croix Island (Algoa Bay, Gqeberha), will have a new closure area. The island was previously home to the largest breeding penguin colony, but numbers crashed and in the 2024 breeding season recorded just 1,350 breeding pairs;
• Bird Island (Algoa Bay, Gqeberha), with 1,650 breeding pairs, will now have a 20km closure radius from the lighthouse;
• Dassen Island (West Coast), now the biggest breeding colony with 2,300 pairs in 2024, will retain the interim closure under current permit conditions;
• Robben Island (Cape Town), will have a significant 20 km fisheries exclusion zone consistent with the initial Island Closure Experiment of a decade ago. Before Wednesday’s announcement, the no-fishing zone was only in the much smaller Marine Protected Area;
• Stony Point (Betty’s Bay) will have a new closure applicable to all fishing vessels and that will now cover a very significant foraging area; and
• Dyer Island (Gansbaai), as reflected in current permit conditions.

George said this agreement “reflects a science-based, cooperative effort to implement effective closures around key penguin breeding islands”.

“These measures, subject to being made an order of court and reflecting the duration [10 years] outlined in the previous Minister’s (Barbara Creecy) decision of 4 August 2023, represent a balanced approach to conserving penguin habitats while respecting the needs of the fishing industry,” George said.

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