Elna Kotze:

The grasslands are extremely threatened. It's no melodramatic statement if I say that we are fighting the last-ditch fight for the survival of grasslands. In Africa, this is it. It is confined to South Africa, to this particular region.

Grasslands are so, so threatened. The single greatest threat remains tree farming. The timber industry, the big corporations, have zoned this whole area as "good for timber." That means that this million hectares that we've designated as a Biosphere Reserve – more than half of that has been designated "good for timber."

Arguably, there may be three times this much left. But the other two areas are even worse under threat from afforestation, and one cannot fight on all fronts. That's why we had to, sort of, prioritize an area that we would really put our last ditch fight in.

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