The Windenham Wetland Protected Environment on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast has formally been declared.

The story of this Protected Environment began almost a decade ago. In 2015 the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) initiated monitoring programmes for selected, critical wetland habitats supporting the Endangered frog Hyperolius pickersgilli (Pickersgill’s Reed Frog) in the eThekwini Municipality. One of the selected wetlands was the ‘Widenham Wetland’ located in the suburb of Widenham, immediately south of the town of Umkomaas, approximately 45km south of Durban and within the eThekwini Municipality. The area is home to over 27,400 people with over 7,800 households of which 8.8% are informal dwellings. The site comprises of eight different erven and was acquired by the municipality in 2010 after a proposed residential development on the site was stopped because of the discovery of the then Critically Endangered Pickersgill’s Reed Frog.

Widenham is a small (~1.6ha) channelled valley bottom wetland that comprises a mix of alien thicket / woodland and herbaceous marshland. It is located within the lower reaches of a small coastal stream system with relatively broad valley-bottom and a gentle longitudinal slope gradient and formed immediately upstream of the frontal dune system characteristic of coastal KZN.

Currently, much of the area within and around the Protected Environment has been transformed, and biennial wetland health assessments since 2015 show that the Present Ecological State (PES) of the wetland is classified as a D, which is Largely Modified. In short, Widenham Wetland represented a small, impacted system surrounded by urban infrastructure that was not a particularly intact state, but one that still provided habitat for a key endangered focal species for the EWT in the province.

In 2019 the EWT initiated actions to protect the Widenham wetland and drive long-term management and rehabilitation interventions that would safeguard this little natural space and the species within it for generations to come. A logical approach to achieve this goal was through Biodiversity Stewardship – an approach to securing land in biodiversity priority areas through entering into agreements with landowners with the intention of securing the biodiversity of South Africa. Fortunately, the wetland was purchased by the municipality, who were key partners in the project. A site assessment indicated that the area qualified for the Protected Environment category provided rehabilitation actions were developed and guided by a detailed Protected Area Management Plan. Working with key stakeholders such as eThekwini Municipality and Verdant Environmental, a detailed rehabilitation and management plan was developed.