Eco-justice group The Green Connection says parts of a second environmental impact assessment for Karpowership SA fraudulently present the views of the commercial aquaculture industry as those of West Coast small-scale fishers.
In a complaint filed with the department of forestry, fisheries & the environment on Monday, The Green Connection says the environmental assessment practitioner, Triplo4, failed to comply with environmental impact assessment (EIA) regulations in conducting public participation processes. Based on the misrepresentation, the group has asked the department to suspend Karpowership’s pending application for environmental authorisation and to fully investigate this allegation.
The Green Connection and lobby group Outa have brought separate court cases against the energy regulator’s decision to grant Karpowership SA generation licences.
In 2021 Karpowership SA, majority-owned by a Turkish energy company, was appointed by the department of mineral resources & energy as one of the preferred bidders in the emergency energy procurement programme. The bid included bringing its gas-to-power floating power stations to the ports of Coega, Saldanha and Richards Bay to generate about 1,200MW of power and supply this to the national grid.
Karpowership’s first application for environmental authorisation was refused, and so was its appeal against this decision. This was in part because the first EIA failed to meet minimum requirements for public participation. According to the department of forestry, fisheries & the environment, the first application failed to appropriately account for concerns about the impact the power ships might have on the broader community of Saldanha, who rely on small-scale fishing.
It has since filed a new application to get these approvals. But The Green Connection says Karpowership’s new EIA process did not only fail again to tackle these concerns, but also falsely implied that small-scale fishers were adequately consulted.
The environmental group said in its complaint that the new process did not “cure the gaps in information and the procedural defects that were found to be material” in its previous EIA, and which led to environment minister Barbara Creecy “dismissing Karpower’s appeal against the [department’s] refusal to issue an authorisation”.
Afro Development Planning, which was contracted by Triplo4 to undertake a supplementary socioeconomic assessment for the EIA, appointed consultant Steenkamp and Rezaei to conduct the small-scale fisheries engagement process on their behalf. However, these consultants misrepresented the people who attended a public participation engagement for small-scale fishers, according to The Green Connection.
The complaint states that there was only one small-scale fisher at the meeting and that the majority of those who signed the attendance register titled “Small-scale Fisheries Engagement” were not small-scale fishers.
The majority of attendees at the meeting held in October 2022 “clearly identified themselves as being directors, owners or officials in the aquaculture industry” but none of them was a small-scale fisher or interim relief fisher permitted to fish in the Saldanha Bay and Langebaan area. It is difficult to understand why these people were involved in a focus group that claimed to represent the small-scale sector when they were not in a position to do this”, the complaint says.
The consultancy said in the report that fishers were probably at sea because there was a snoek run.
The complaint goes on to state that consultants used the information gathered as if it was valid, reliable small-scale fisher information.
The Final Environmental Impact Assessment compiled by Triplo4 concludes that the potential impact on small-scale fishers was thoroughly investigated. However, The Green Connection said that since there was no focus group meeting with small-scale fishers, it was “difficult to understand how this conclusion was derived”.
The final report submitted by Triplo4 in support of Karpowership SA’s application for environmental approval identifies no significant impact directly associated with small-scale fishing.
The regulator has refused to release the actual numbers on which the Karpower price per unit of electricity generated is based, said The Green Connection’s Liziwe McDaid.
“Both Outa and The Green Connection are bringing separate court cases to compel [the release of this information] and then to argue that [the regulator] should not have given the licence. In our case, we are saying that [the regulator] should have waited until it had the EIA before it considered the licence.”
Previously, the director of public prosecutions declined to act on a case opened by the Green Scorpions in 2021 against Triplo4 for the role the consultancy allegedly played in Karpowership’s attempt in 2020 to use emergency regulations during the Covid-19 pandemic to bypass the process of obtaining environmental permits.
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