17 March 2025
The government, seabird conservation groups and the pelagic fishing industry recently reached an agreement over fishing restrictions around six critical penguin breeding islands. Archive photo: John Yeld.
The debate over how to protect South Africa’s critically endangered African Penguins from extinction is often seen as a trade-off between environmental and economic rights.
The pelagic fishing industry has opposed a push by environmental groups to expand no-fishing zones around African Penguin colonies. The industry says it provides about 5,100 jobs and contributes R5.5-billion annually to the economy.
But the economic value of penguin colonies is also significant, a recent report by Anchor Environmental Consultants suggests. The report values South Africa’s penguin colonies at between R2-billion and R4.5-billion in 2023. Between 1,046 and 4,611 jobs are linked to penguin colonies, the report estimates.
The valuation takes into account the value of tourism, property benefits, education and media-related benefits, and the existence value (the economic value people get from knowing that a particular environmental resource or species exists whether or not they directly engage with it) associated with penguin colonies.
The researchers analysed data on general tourist revenue in the Western Cape, as well as trends in the number of visitors to the Simon’s Town colony over 25 years as well as their spending patterns. Capetonians were interviewed on their perceived value of penguins and web-based surveys of publicly available photos were conducted.
In October last year, the African Penguin, which occurs only along the South African and Namibian coastlines, became the first of the world’s 18 penguin species to be listed as critically endangered. Over the last 20 years, the African Penguin has declined so severely that if no effective interventions are made to protect it, it may be extinct within a decade.
The Anchor report was commissioned by the Endangered Wildlife Trust and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE). Its authors, Johanna Brühl and Jane Turpie, argue that the loss of the African Penguin would constitute a huge reputational risk to South Africa, whose brand relies on environmental stewardship and the measures it implements to protect global assets for which it is perceived as a guardian.
If the African penguin were to become extinct in the wild, South Africa’s brand reputation as an environmentally healthy destination, famed for its natural assets, would suffer.
The report warns that successfully conserving African Penguins requires more than island closures. It requires improved ocean health management through an ecosystem approach to fisheries, which takes into account the entire ecosystem of the species being managed, as penguin extinction could have unforeseen ecological consequences.
The report shows that to date, penguin tourism benefits have been largely confined to the two land colonies in the Western Cape, with by far the greater contribution coming from Simon’s Town. Bird Island in Algoa Bay has particularly good tourism potential which has hardly been realized, according to penguin researcher Lorien Pichegru of Nelson Mandela University.
The potential growth of penguin tourism is illustrated by the numbers of visitors to the Simon’s Town colony, which trebled to nearly 800 000 in the 24 years 1995-2019; the proportion of international visitors during the same period doubled from 44 to 88%, indicating particular potential for further growth in this sector.
“With South Africa becoming a more and more popular destination, the value of penguins to the South African economy becomes of increasing importance,” says Brühl.
The two mainland colonies of penguins — at Simon’s Town and Betty’s Bay — are among very few places in the world outside Antarctica where tourists can visit a breeding penguin colony without making a trip to an island.
The Simon’s Town colony makes a major contribution to Cape Town’s attractiveness for tourism: it is ranked fifth of the top visitor attractions in Cape Town after Table Mountain, the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, and Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. On a smaller scale, the Stony Point colony has been ranked the top visitor attraction in Betty’s Bay.
By the 1950s there were about 300,000 African penguins but by the turn of the century, there were only 50,000 breeding pairs. In 2023, there were 8,324 breeding pairs. Underlying this decline is a range of factors linked to human activity. This includes oil spills, an end to seal culling (seals are penguins’ major predator and they also compete with them for food), and the growth of the pelagic fishing industry, which brought humans in competition with seabirds for anchovies and pilchards.
Both anchovies and pilchards have high natural fluctuations in their population sizes, which also affect penguin population fluctuations.
Enter the effects of climate change, which often compound pre-existing human causes of species declines. Environmental changes have caused pilchard populations to shift 400km to the south-east, making it less available to four breeding seabird species.
Much of the pilchard – which some scientists regard as particularly important for adult penguin survivorship - became unavailable to penguins as it was now too far away from any of the breeding colonies.
The number of breeding African penguins halved between 2001 and 2003 in the Eastern Cape; and 2004 and 2006 in the Western Cape, respectively, and have continued to decline since.
This also had ramifications for the pelagic fishing industry, which had to invest in bigger boats with greater refrigeration facilities to travel longer distances. In 2007, a new canning factory was built in Mossel Bay, closer to the new centre of pilchard distribution.
Pilchards are canned for human consumption and are consumed as a cheap form of protein in southern Africa, but local anchovies are too small to be suitable for human consumption so are processed into fish meal and oil, which are exported for aquaculture, primarily of farmed salmon and shrimp. This conversion is ecologically wasteful as at every trophic level in a food chain only about ten per cent of energy is conserved.
Government decided in 2008 to experimentally close fishing areas around some of the islands on which penguins breed, but this failed to arrest the decline. In the Western Cape, the penguin population has continued to decline by 1.5% annually over the past decade.
In the Eastern Cape, the decline has worsened significantly over the same period to an annual average of 13% - on account of the introduction of bunkering (ship-to-ship transfers of oil outside of harbours) in 2016; and increased vessel traffic. The noise associated with both appears to interfere with the ability of penguins to forage; the former carries the additional risk of oil spills.
Bunkering was halted temporarily by SARS in 2023 on account of tax irregularities by the companies involved, and in the subsequent breeding season penguin numbers at St Croix Island increased for the first time in a decade. But earlier this year, a licence was issued to a new company which resumed bunkering in February, according to Pichegru.
A recent study has shown that the government’s current no-take zones have little benefit to penguins, except for Bird Island, and very little cost to the fisheries. Last year, two seabird conservation groups, BirdLife South Africa and the South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), took the government and fishing industry to court in a bid to expand the current no-take zones.
On Wednesday, environment minister Dion George announced a settlement had been reached over closures at six penguin islands.
The settlement follows the recommendation of an expert panel, appointed by former environment minister Barbara Creecy. The panel’s recommendations, which Creecy had declined to follow, were that the trade-offs between the costs and benefits of island closures should be weighed up by island rather than at a national level.
The panel had concluded that the costs to the fishing industry and benefits to penguins associated with island closures differ from island to island, and from sector to sector within the fishing industry.
The extent to which the new ones improve the plight of penguins remains to be seen. Pichegru says that although the new closures are a decade overdue, they should make an important contribution to improving penguin survival.