Imagine a world without African Penguins.

To our valued supporters,

We are thrilled to announce that today, at the High Court in Pretoria, an order of court was issued after a hard-won settlement agreement was reached by BirdLife South Africa and SANCCOB (represented by the Biodiversity Law Centre) with commercial sardine and anchovy purse-seine fishers (subsequently endorsed by the State). This order of court is an historic victory in the ongoing battle to save the Critically Endangered African Penguin from extinction in the wild!

The order officially recognises the settlement agreement which provides for the delineations of no-take zones for commercial sardine and anchovy fishing around African Penguin breeding colonies that lie within coastal areas where this commercial fishery operates. In a last minute bid to avoid litigation which could have lasted for years, the settlement focused on closures around six key African Penguin colonies: Dassen Island, Robben Island, Stony Point, Dyer Island, St Croix Island and Bird Island. The aim behind our focus on these particular colonies is to ensure regional representation towards maximising the benefits of closures for the global African Penguin population.

The newly delineated no-take zones will replace the current closures resulting from Minister Barbara Creecy’s illogical decision in 2023 to enforce interim closures which conservation scientists have always maintained to be inadequate. According to the agreed changes, the closure around Robben Island off the West Coast will be significantly increased, while the existing closure will be retained around Dassen Island. Stony Point in the southwestern Cape will be subject to a closure that is more than three times the size of the current closure and closely matches what BirdLife South Africa’s scientists and their partners have determined as the preferred foraging area for African Penguins. At Dyer Island, the existing closure will remain unchanged, given the importance of this area to local purse-seine fishers in the Overberg region. Finally, in Algoa Bay, the breeding colony of St Croix Island will benefit from a reconfigured closure covering important African Penguin foraging areas, while still enabling fishing vessels access to the harbour and fishing grounds near Gqeberha. As with the closure around Robben Island, the agreed closure at Bird Island will extend 20 km around this colony.

As explained by Dr Alistair McInnes, our Seabird Conservation Programme Manager: “While we have made compromises by accepting the existing closures at Dassen and Dyer Islands to expedite the resolution of the matter, we are pleased that we have secured closures that safeguard the African Penguins’ foraging areas throughout their South African breeding range, and that serve to allow recovery of the species by promoting access to sardines and anchovies”.

The settlement was hard fought for by our team of scientists and legal experts. Negotiations started in mid-February and continued for weeks during all hours and all days of the week. Given the fundamental challenge — that both the industry and penguins want to focus their fishing efforts where the small pelagic fish are most abundant — both parties had to be willing to compromise. Importantly, the revised closures born of this effort will be enforced through the court order which mandates that they be put in place immediately by the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. A further benefit is that these will now remain in place for the next 10 years. This will enable our scientists to monitor the effects of the reduction in fishing around the colonies on penguin population numbers.

Whilst the settlement is an important step forward on the journey to save this iconic species, there is still a long way to go, and much work needs to be done with government and with our partners to ensure that we are able to attend to other threats to penguins, as well as closely monitor the enforcement and effectiveness of island closures.

The key to this successful outcome for African Penguins is the fact that we have not travelled this journey alone. Many (in fact, countless) researchers, academics, agencies, institutions, lawyers, NGOs, generous donors, journalists and creatives that have given incredibly generously of their time, resources and expertise to enable us to achieve what we have to date.

We thank you all and look forward to continued collaboration toward a brighter future not only for African Penguins, but for marine ecosystems generally and the livelihoods these support.

Mitigating maritime threats

There is an accelerating demand for ocean space and resource use, to grow the economic benefits provided by the ocean. This expansion needs to be conducted in an environmentally sound manner that doesn’t put undue pressure on threatened species and ecosystems. BirdLife South Africa is working on several fronts to monitor and help mitigate these pressures. In Algoa Bay, we are particularly concerned about ship-to-ship bunkering, i.e. the transfer of fuel between vessels outside harbours, which has resulted in several oil spills and the exponential increase in shipping traffic in recent years and the associated heightened levels of marine noise. We are part of a study looking at marine noise and its potential link to the decrease in penguin numbers at St Croix Island. More broadly, we monitor development applications to ensure their impact on African Penguins (and other seabirds) is avoided or minimised.

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