4.1. Training and capacity building
4.2. Research and need of policy
South Africa has well-established institutions for tertiary education in forestry. Training takes place in six tertiary educational institutions:
- University of Stellenbosch (Faculty of Forestry)Students are trained in disciplines such as wood science, silviculture and community forestry. Their training includes biological and social sciences as well as engineering. At the University of Stellenbosch, an average of 30 first and 13 postgraduate degrees in forestry and wood science are conferred annually by the Faculty of Forestry. In the industrial forestry subsector, the general feeling is that the current supply and demand of graduates and diploma holders is in balance. Tertiary education in South Africa has an important role to play in the sustainability of our forests and the curriculum will have to broaden its scope and strength.
- University of Natal (Faculty of Agricultural Sciences)
- University of the Pretoria (Tree Pathology Co-operative Programme)
- Port Elizabeth Technikon (Faculty of Forestry)
- Natal Technikon (Department of Pulp and Paper Technology)
- Fort Cox College of Agriculture and Forestry
There are still gender imbalances in tertiary forestry education and only 15.8 percent of all forestry students in South Africa are women. Even Forestry graduates, who are employed in the forest sector, are still mostly whites, currently 34 percent of students studying forestry are black but these imbalances are slowly improving (National Forestry Action Programme (NFAP), 1997, p. 115 -116).
4.2.1. Current forestry research in South Africa
4.2.2. Advances in forestry research
Forest research needs to be properly directed to deliver knowledge and techniques that can be usefully applied and put into practice as a variety of innovations. It should lead to:
- better policies;South Africa has a special need to unlock knowledge and information from past and future research and make it accessible to everyone, especially those in rural areas. There is a general consensus that research and development in the forest sector in South Africa are currently not capable of delivering the necessary services needed to support all the aspects of a thriving forest sector, which include community forestry, industrial forestry and the management of natural forests and woodlands.
- improved practices;
- new and useful technologies of many kinds;
- better awareness and understanding of forestry issues among the general public.
Current research includes:
- indigenous forests and woodlands;
- tree breeding;
- wood properties, mechanical and processing requirements;
- silviculture;
- water use in forestry;
- social forestry;
- atmospheric pollution;
- information systems;
- biopulping and bleaching;
- waste and pollution management in the pulp and paper sector.
A research and technology transfer from the beginning has supported the development of forestry in South Africa. Successful development was determined by the outcome of ongoing research programmes. Through tree breeding, volume production has increased by 10-30 percent, and a smaller branch size has led to a 10 percent reduction of pruning costs. Improvement through cloning of genotypes has brought about a 46 percent improvement in average volume production of Eucalyptus grandis clones, and 25-70 percent less spitting of harvested timber.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS), for example, are being used to manage the vast amount of information involved in the Afforestation Permit System to manage mountain catchments in the Western Cape for bioclimatic modeling, and to classify plantation sites to get maximum value from them.
Research in the pulp and paper industry aims to reduce the environmental impact of this industry, mainly by using certain fungi in pre-treating woodchips, in biopulping and in using fungi instead of chlorine in bleaching chemical pulps for the paper industry.
Significant improvements have been made in waste and pollution management in the pulp and paper sector through, for example, a 10-fold increase in water-use efficiency in the pulp mill as well as the management and abatement of air pollution and effluents.
The significant ability for forest research in South Africa is distributed among the science council. The science council is made up of Environmentek at the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), the Plant Protection Research Institute, at the Agricultural Research Council, universities and forestry companies. They all have significant capacity in-house, as well as in the Institute for Commercial Forestry Research, primarily funded by contributions from members of the Forestry Owners Association (DWAF, 1995).
