LISTEN: Plans to bulldoze Lake St Lucia raises concerns
A call to bulldoze the St Lucia Estuary Mouth has left the North Coast community divided.
Bulldozing results in an artificial breach of a temporary open of the estuary mouth.
But estuarine scientist Nicolette Forbes warns that this interferes with the natural process as well as restoration projects taking place at the lake.
"Now this wasn't a good thing for the estuarine, though it suited a certain sector of the animals that use the estuary like the fish, it wasn't necessarily a good and natural functioning of the estuary.
"So the project I was involved in took in account all of those estuaries and the different user groups around it to get it back to a much more natural dynamic and not interfering with the mouth is a part of that."
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The Lake St Lucia is Africa's largest estuarine lake. A serious drought in the area has hampered the lake, back in 2014 it went completely dry.
Forbes says bulldozing is a quick-fix solution that threatens conservationists' restoration project - pushing it back 10 years.
"The whole idea was to let this estuary find its own way back to where it does naturally where the Umfolozi River is linked to the estuary and it is able to open and close the mouth naturally so that they will make that take that back another 10 years by interfering."
Listen to the full interview:
