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FIRE PROTECTION ASSOCIATION SUPPORT STRATEGY OUT FOR COMMENT
- 11 October 2024
- Environmental Law
- SA Legal Academy
The Department of Forestry, Fisheries & the Environment has called for input by 10 November 2024 on a draft fire protection association support strategy. Its overarching objective is to provide ‘equitable support’ to these associations, especially given that inadequate resources often make it difficult to ensure the level of protection necessary.
This is noting that a fire protection association is:
- a statutory organisation registered under the Act
- comprises landowners and other people in a rural community voluntarily forming a group to ‘predict, prevent, manage and fight veld fires’ threatening their lives, property, livelihoods and the environment, and
- to some extent dependent on the co-operation of the local government authority concerned,
Each local authority has been assigned a ‘risk class’ determined by its vulnerability to veld fires. It is therefore the authority’s responsibility to ensure that land owners and communities within their jurisdiction receive adequate information on the level of veld fire risk in the area and how to manage it.
Challenges include:
- inadequate local authority capacity to perform that role
- landowners unaware of their obligations under the National Veld & Forest Fire Act, 1998 (including the payment of an annual levy)
- landowners unable to fulfil these obligations
- cross-border land ownership, and
- the marginalised nature of rural communities in areas not yet reached by the department’s ‘working on fire’ programme.
Against that backdrop, the draft strategy focuses on:
- criteria to be used in assessing the level of financial and non-financial support required, and
- support application and related processing procedures
Please click the link below for more information:
- draft strategy
Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch
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