The projects covered in this article are green by definition – the project outcomes are intended to contribute to the planet and sustainability in some way.

Project manager Shaun Cozett, who works with the South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi), holds an honour’s degree in Environmental Science and Social Anthropology, so he has always been interested in the link between people and conservation.

His work on projects that, in particular, focus on development training economics, has resulted in his heightened appreciation for the role played by project management in achieving success.

Cozett now has a number of ‘green’ projects under his belt, and here he shares some of the successes, failures and lessons learnt on these projects.

“Eco-coffins” make creative use of alien timber

On an ongoing basis, the Working for Water (WfW) programme seeks to eradicate alien species of trees.

In the mid-2000s, having cleared in excess of one million hectares of trees, the challenge existed to ensure the timber did not go to waste and that a model be developed for its use, which would be sustainable and generate jobs.

“We initiated a project to manufacture low-cost coffins and make these available to a community in KwaZulu-Natal that was marked by poverty and a particularly high – and climbing – death rate,” says Cozett.

The concept won an innovation award from the World Bank, which brought in the equivalent of R1 million. Co-funding came from the KZN Provincial Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs.

“The desired project outcomes were low-cost coffins, produced at an acceptable quality, which would create jobs for the local community,” says Cozett.

“What was innovative was that we worked with faith-based communities and the KZN arm of the South African Council of Churches, which was engaged in a project aimed at ethical funerals.”

This was a response to the alarming increase in expenditure on funerals and – bearing in mind the economic state of the community – a call for lower cost funerals.

An additional stakeholder group was the traditional leaders, and the team developed a partnership with the eThekwini KwaZulu-Natal Provincial House of Traditional Leaders.

A further role-player was an international partner, the United Kingdom-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation.

It was important to change perceptions: A community accustomed to showing their respect for the deceased by means of large, expensive coffins had to see the “eco-coffin” as the coffin of choice and not a ‘pauper’s coffin’.

“There was a lot of negotiation around buy-in,” says Cozett. “The norm was for the bereaved family to go to the undertakers and buy a burial package that included a coffin. Here, we were asking to use the faith community to be the distribution point for the coffins, and working with undertakers to not just promote the standard package.”

Understanding that an adaptable approach would be necessary in this unprecedented project, the project team adopted a flexible project management methodology.

“Indeed, the main learning on this project was flexibility,” explains Cozett. “With so many different stakeholders, you can’t be too rigid – that just diminishes your likelihood of success.

“A huge part of our success stemmed from having the scope to think innovatively and creatively.”

The outcome was a sustainable model that could be replicated, creating 25 jobs in the local KZN community, including those of millworkers and full-time overseers of the wood production.

WfW is now applying the learnings and model at a much higher level for the government, providing school desks and waiting room benches at public hospitals.

Community support for the environment

Next, Cozett describes a project with a less successful outcome: the Green Futures Project. Here, he was tasked to look at a model developed and successfully implemented in the private sector for the training and development of unemployed youth, and apply it in the public sector linked to community-based natural resource management.

It involved the South African National Biodiversity Programme and Cape Flats Nature, with which Sanbi had previously worked to conserve small pockets of land with high biodiversity value.

A major challenge was to get local communities to buy into the ethos of conservation, asking what needs to be done for them to see the land surrounding them as worthy of conservation.

The response from the community was: “We need the land to create jobs.”

Sanbi looked at models and agreed that the approach would be to implement the green futures model introduced at a private nature reserve where learners were put through a one-year learnership that offset some of the costs of training.

But how to take this model and implement it on the nature reserves on the Cape Flats, particularly when the model itself was expensive to implement?

“The economies of scale were just not there,” says Cozett. “The outcome is a high-quality training programme – focusing on specifically producing indigenous plants for sale – that we put a small number of learners through.

“However, we found that in the areas targeted, there wasn’t a big enough market for indigenous plants that would carry the costs of the training – the market couldn’t sustain the college.”

He refers to this as a project failure: a major lesson learnt was that one cannot assume that because a model worked in the private sector, it would work in the public sector.

Another lesson was the importance of political buy-in from all the partners. “It’s very difficult to get such a thing off the ground,” notes Cozett.

“Funding came from Table Mountain Fund, City of Cape Town, and we worked with Cape Action for People and the Environment, Cape Flats Nature, WfW and Working for Wetlands; and each party had to be reading off the same page.

“I’m not sure all the stakeholders understood the concept and the project, and what they were buying into. Because it was based on a successful model, it was easy to show the community how it could benefit them; there was a lot of expectation created,” he says.

“In the end, we wrote up the project in such a way that if funding was ever forthcoming, it would then be implementable.”

All was not lost. A spin-off was that they could employ people at one of the nature reserves on a short-term basis to clear a retention pond of all the invasive aquatic plants, and they are looking at small projects requiring low inputs, where the community can be involved in beekeeping, for example.

Systematically identifying the aliens

Cozett is currently engaged in another project, that of early detection and rapid response regarding alien invasive plants.

“We are attempting to identify, assess and eradicate lesser known plants, particularly succulents, before they become national problems,” he explains.

“What is evident now, in the early stages of the project, is firstly that each plant we investigate is a project on its own; and secondly, the importance of quality. If our research isn’t good enough and we get it wrong – labelling a plant ‘invasive’ when, in fact, it may be a valuable and indigenous one – it could have a disastrous effect.”

With about 100 species under the literal and figurative microscope – either Category 1A emerging or on the surveillance list as having to monitor – Cozett and his team have their work cut out for them.

Faith-based conservation

There is a growing international movement for faith communities to have environmental plans that identify how we can all become examples of good practice and green living.

“If you look at every faith in the world, each one’s sacred text contains an intrinsic rule to care for creation. We often overlook it,” says Cozett.

In 2008, the Anglican Church of Cape Town identified eight priorities in a 10-year vision. Each priority had a task team set up for how the church would respond to each priority area.

“Mine was a 10-year plan for the environment,” says Cozett. “At the same time, the Alliance of Religions and Conservation were contacted by the United Nations Secretary General to support faith communities around the world to develop long-term plans.

“What we have done for the Anglican Church in Southern Africa was look at the work being done around the world, initiatives in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, and create a national plan for making churches more eco-friendly, through the messages sent in church services and looking at what the Bible teaches about us about the environment.”

Their flagship programme is the Season of Creation, running in September and October each year, and which is marked by teaching and action in the environment.

Another involves establishing an environmental desk in each of the 25 dioceses.

A major lesson learnt here is the importance of buy-in and making the link between faith and conservation. “It is essential that we provide good reasons for people to embrace what climate change means and identify those who can articulate the message well,” says Cozett.

As for general project learnings in the ‘green’ space, he says the truth is that we work in South Africa where the environment is not a priority for everyone. “In some communities, it is a lot easier. In others, it seems to be in opposition to bread and butter issues,” he notes.

“The hard work is in communicating that this is, in fact, a bread and butter issue, that climate change poses a high risk for water and food security. It’s also not a case of conservation at the expense of job creation. If one is creative about how we approach these projects, there can be both.

“Lastly, every ‘green’ project needs a project champion. You could have the best project management approach and the largest budget – but with no champion to articulate the cause, your job is going to be very difficult,” says Cozett. ☑

Taryn van Olden