If you go back far enough, the story of biodiversity is also the story of astronomy. In the early universe, only the light elements such as hydrogen and helium existed. Through immense heat and pressure, the heavier elements that make up organic life - namely carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron, and many others - were forged deep within ancient stars; enriched minerals and elements that scattered across the cosmos when some of these stars exploded in spectacular supernovae. Over billions of years, this stellar material became part of new stars, planets, rocks, and oceans - establishing geology. Geology became soil. Simple organic compounds gradually increased in complexity through chemical reactions, eventually forming the first self-replicating cells - a process known as abiogenesis. Soil became plants. Plants became ecosystems. And then: ecosystems bore fauna and people. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the oxygen you breathe, and the carbon that forms every cell in your body were created inside stars long before the Earth existed. We are all made of stardust - one moment in a chain that began in stellar fire billions of years ago and, in a sense, we are the universe looking back on itself.
Humans enter the ecological story within the last few milliseconds of geological time, and hot out of the gates we’re off altering our blue orb with industrial vigor; extracting and burning until the profundity of our galactic origins collapsed into absurdity right around 2015, when a Republican Senator from Oklahoma brought a snowball onto the United States Capitol. Fresh out of a wintry Washington, D.C., the icy projectile on the Senate floor was meant to challenge reports of a warming globe and dispute the overwhelming scientific consensus. Referring to climate change as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is a brand that’s scarred and hobbled Congress ever since. This now- infamous misconstruance was a failure to understand the difference between weather and climate - and a caveat that the truth of nature should never correlate with one’s political views.
The consequences of climate change are no longer arguable. Novel terms such as "Godzilla-strength super El Niño" make for startling headlines, and amplified search trends, but with the most severe heatwave ever boiling over Europe causing deaths, disruptions and emergency warnings; references to this extreme climate event are not merely alarmist hysteria - and certainly not a Left-wing hoax. If you have yet to experience this intense swelter - fill up your ice trays, buy some mojito mix and humbly recall the difference between weather and climate. The city of Paris even banned public alcohol consumption to reduce heat-related health risks as France just experienced a record-breaking heatwave. The currently-unfolding super El Niño could be the most potent observed in over a century, according to forecasts. The mercury spiking up doesn’t just translate to human discomfort (and revised travel agendas): a Super El Niño is an exceptionally strong warming of the tropical Pacific ocean that disrupts weather patterns across the world. Its effects include record global temperatures, severe droughts in some regions and flooding in others, significantly increased wildfire risks with reduced burning intervals, and heightened pressures on water supplies, agriculture and infrastructures.
In South Africa these events are linked to sustained hotter conditions, reduced summer rainfall, water scarcity, and lower crop yields, which can threaten food security. Staples such as maize are expected to be the most vulnerable. Grazing land becomes barren. Pollinators get heat-stressed, threatening their interactions. Biodiversity suffers through phenological mismatches between species, when seasonal timings between life cycle events - such as flowering, breeding and migration - are pushed out of synchronicity, reducing some species numbers, which then reproduce less. Fisheries also deteriorate because marine ecosystems are disrupted through warmer seas, altered nutrient cycles, and coral bleaching. This leads to higher food prices and an increased dependence on imports. Human health is impacted largely by heat-related illness, heatstroke, smoke inhalation, exacerbated chronic conditions including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, changes in infectious disease transmission patterns, reduced water quality after droughts or floods, and drownings as more people go swimming to cool off. Heatwaves are inevitably deadly, even in developed nations. A warming world amplifies environmental, social, healthcare and economic pressures across ecosystems and communities. El Niño, it should still be said, is a natural climate oscillation that ecosystems evolved with and is not inherently bad. However, along with warmer baselines from climate change it intensifies temperature extremes, and the world is currently on track for 2.6 - 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming over the course of this century. This shoots well past the best-case scenario set by the Paris climate agreement of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, while mildly avoiding the worst predictions. El Niño is fuel to the fire, turning up the thermostat significantly beyond these averages.
Africa is disproportionately affected because many African countries experience severe impacts despite contributing relatively little to global greenhouse gas emissions - often having fewer resources and services to help absorb climate shocks. El Niño can disrupt rainfall patterns across the continent, leading to drought in parts of southern and eastern Africa and flooding in some equatorial regions. These shifts affect agriculture, water availability, food security, biodiversity, energy production, and livelihoods - especially where communities depend heavily on rain-fed farming. In Southern Africa the most recent El Niño cycle brought the region’s worst drought in more than a century, leaving 61 million people in need of assistance, straining livestock, water systems and pasturelands, and pushing more than 8 million people into food insecurity. A forecast by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization points to an over 50 percent probability of agricultural drought across large parts of Namibia and Botswana, extending into Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and parts of Mozambique and Madagascar. In a region where livestock underpins both food security and household wealth, African farmers face a tumultuous future that could explode into a regional crisis. South Africa is likely to face significant weather-related agricultural risks. While strong harvests could keep food prices relatively contained for most of 2026, prolonged El Niño events have historically caused multi-year droughts, pushing food inflation into high double digits. Soft commodities grown in tropical regions - such as cocoa, coffee and sugar - are especially exposed and are expected to have prohibitive price increases. This comes after cocoa prices spiked to all-time highs in 2024 driven by severe supply shortages in West Africa due to adverse weather and crop disease, with retail costs still remaining significantly higher than historical averages. Climate change is an equal-opportunity offender to staple-food survivors and coffee snobs alike. So mark your calendars and invest in umbrella stocks, because the World Meteorological Organization has revealed that there is an 80 percent chance the strong climatic event will arrive before September and a 90 percent chance by November.
In a warming world, respecting fire means recognising both its ecological role and its growing power. Humans have been using fire for hundreds of thousands of years, carrying naturally occurring fires into caves as much as 1.8 million years ago, before later learning how to create it on demand. Some ecologists describe humans as a “fire species,” and in many regions, landscapes evolved with repeated human burning. Fire sits right at the boundary between nature and culture. Did humans domesticate fire, or did fire domesticate humans? Human control of fire changed our diet, altered our digestion, increased our social organisation and storytelling, extended waking hours, and affected the migration of people. Some argue that indigenous burning helped maintain open “anthropogenic landscapes” and increased habitat diversity - such as savannas, grasslands and parts of the Amazon.
There is some debate around whether excessive fire suppression constitutes ecological disruption - increasing fuel loads and ensuring larger future fires while potentially reducing biodiversity. Mosaic burns in conjunction with seasonal timings create a shifting landscape of varied "pyrodiversity" - patches of different post-fire ages and vegetation types, preventing uncontrollable wildfires and providing diverse habitats with varied resources for species to complete their life cycles - boosting local biodiversity and environmental resilience. Many species require adjacent, contrasting habitats for breeding, foraging, and sheltering. Habitat mosaics are central to conservation planning, allowing developers to map and replace complex networks of vegetation. In South Africa, this intersects with questions around stewardship, local land knowledge, and shifting conservation management from technocratic to indigenous management. A healthy ecosystem is often adapted to a particular fire regime pattern, however, and not unlimited burning. A newer idea proposes that humanity has entered the Pyrocene - an age defined by human control and disruption of fire. Humans are probably the only species that has repeatedly captured, transported, controlled, and reorganised ecosystems through combustion, using it as a niche construction tool - and in doing so, reshaped both the environment and ourselves. Repeated human burning influenced vegetation structure, animal distributions, migration routes and biodiversity patterns - meaning that in many places humans and landscapes developed together. Indigenous societies developed detailed fire knowledge regarding where to burn, when to burn, at what intensity and during what season - as both a form of governance and conservation. But early humans used fire locally, while industrial societies effectively began burning ancient ecosystems - i.e. fossil fuels - at a planetary scale. Burning carbon in the form of coal, oil and gas meant that we became a species capable of moving carbon between geological and atmospheric timescales, making us more like an “inferno species.” Historically, ecosystems adapted to recurring fire - but now warming climates, land fragmentation, invasive species, and altered rainfall can create fire regimes well outside natural ranges.
Perhaps humans should not try to stop being a fire species, but instead remember what kind of fire species we once were: a humbler and more rational one. As the climate warms, the challenge is not simply preventing fire, but learning to work with fire in ways that reduce risk and support ecological resilience. This is especially relevant in places like South Africa, where many ecosystems are fire-adapted rather than fire-free.
Fynbos has one of those ecological stories that seems almost paradoxical at first: fire is not simply something fynbos survives - it is something it evolved with and depends on, like an ecological reset button. Periodic fire opens space, returns nutrients to the soil, reduces accumulated plant material, and triggers a new generation of growth, while some plant species release seeds due to fire and others wait to emerge only once vegetative competition has been cleared. Many fynbos species have seeds that remain dormant until smoke, heat, or post-fire conditions signal that conditions are ideal, and chemicals in smoke itself can stimulate germination in certain species. Reseeders die in fire but leave behind seeds that germinate afterwards. Resprouters survive underground and regrow from protected roots or lignotubers. A burned fynbos landscape is not dead - it’s just reorganising. Post-fire fynbos can erupt into carpets of flowers, fresh green shoots, orchids, geophytes, and bulbs that may not have appeared for years. Without fire for too long, older plants can dominate, seed banks may decline, and overall biodiversity can decrease - but too frequent fires can be just as harmful, as plants may not reach maturity and replenish seeds, pushing the system towards degradation.
One of the beautiful things about fynbos is that there is no single healthy state. A blackened hillside, a field of young restios, and mature flowering protea can all be healthy: they are simply different moments in a long ecological cycle. Fire in fynbos is less like a catastrophe and more like a pulse. Ash temporarily alters nutrient availability and creates opportunities for germination and rapid growth. The Fire Lily is famous in the Cape for appearing dramatically after fire events. Other bulbs and geophytes also emerge after disturbance, creating bursts of colour. If you walk the same trail in the Southern Cape over several years after a fire, you are not seeing the same landscape recover - you are watching entirely different communities take turns appearing. A field after fire is not one clock restarting - it is thousands of clocks beginning to tick at different speeds. For our indigenous species, resilience means renewing through change.
Animals are not only affected by fire; many species have evolved to depend on fire regimes and the habitats they renew - through flowering, open ground, nutrient pulses, and vegetative succession. After fire, many landscapes produce mass flowering events, creating abundance for pollinators and nectar-feeding birds such as the Cape sugarbird and the orange-breasted sunbird. Small mammals recolonise recovering areas. Insects emerge rapidly into newly open habitats, and some insects are effectively dependent on the existence of nearby burned landscapes. Entire insect communities are post-fire specialists - arriving rapidly after a burn for dead wood, fungi and new vegetation. Across African savannas and grasslands, fire removes old coarse vegetation and stimulates regrowth, attracting grazers such as springbok and blue wildebeest, where large herbivores frequently follow recently burned areas in a moving mosaic of grazing pressure. Cometh the grazers, cometh the predators - with their movements linked indirectly to fire cycles. In northern Australia, several raptors have been observed taking advantage of fires to flush prey, and there are indigenous accounts and some scientific observations suggesting birds such as black kites and brown falcons may even transport burning sticks to spread fires and expose prey. Animals do not merely survive this disturbance; they live with and benefit from it. Humans are not the only fire species - merely the most premeditated and globalised.
After a fire: charcoal remains, but this is not ecologically dead as it hosts microbes, influences soil chemistry and creates microhabitats and fungal colonies. Ash and fungi are collaborators. Biochar - a specialised porous form of charcoal that releases essential plant nutrients and provides a habitat for beneficial soil microbes - becomes especially interesting in this conversation because it sits almost exactly at the meeting point between fire, decomposition, carbon, and renewal. If fire and fungi are two ways ecosystems transform life, biochar - made through a process called pyrolysis - is one of the things fire leaves behind that changes what happens next. Fire creates carbon structures. Fungi inhabit them. Plants connect to them. Functioning as a platform for ecological relationships, biochar creates carbon that decomposes very slowly, and fire can therefore both release carbon and actually stabilise some of it.
Fire and heat are not merely destructive forces - they have often acted as evolutionary and natural architects. Not everywhere, and not all the time, but in many systems across Earth, they help create diversity, maintain habitats, recycle nutrients, and prevent ecological stagnation. That said, there is a difference between natural thermal variation and rapid anthropogenic warming. The first helped shape biodiversity; the second is increasingly pushing species beyond adaptation limits. Climate change is changing the rules: ecosystems evolved with predictable periodic fire patterns, not necessarily with hotter average temperatures, longer fire seasons, invasive species and more extreme weather overall.
Fire can be destructive. Heat can become harmful. But in many ecosystems, disturbance has also been one of the great makers of life. Fire does not end the story: it turns the page. Fire not only consumes - it reveals. In fynbos, fire is an old rhythm - one written into the roots, the seeds, and the memory of the land. The fynbos teaches a different kind of resilience: not resisting change, but renewing through it. This challenges the human instinct to see all fire as loss. Everything flows, and nothing remains. Some landscapes are born from flame. Respecting fire means knowing when it renews and when it overwhelms.
As we reflect on South African Environment Month this past June, much can be said about the lukewarm inadequacy with which it was celebrated and the lack of seriousness around current governmental priorities and policy shifts. Reasonably troubling is the government’s plans to introduce a more flexible environmental impact assessment process: proposed changes that could weaken public participation, undermine proper assessment and increase the incentives for corruption - raising the risks and damage from human development on natural ecosystems. The possibility of greasing palms with silver for expedited discretionary approval is likely not in the best interests of nature conservation.
A 2026 horizon scan for biodiversity conservation in South Africa highlights three critical needs: adaptive governance systems, cross-sectoral collaboration capacity and vigilance around new technologies that may simultaneously offer solutions and create new environmental pressures. The energy transition, transmission infrastructures, artificial intelligence, loss of natural vegetation, poor regulation on pesticides, pressures on agriculture, regulatory barriers and biodiversity monitoring gaps are among the major issues of the coming period.
In our previous features for National Environment Month we've examined the earth, its water and air systems in their relation to ecosystems, indigenous flora & fauna and conservation challenges. No element stands alone: the challenge is now for the public, regulators, environmental watchdogs and activists to take meaningful action - abandoning the silos of niche interests and pet topics to collaborate as part of an integrated bigger picture. Nature already does it - and so should we.
This is part four of a four-part opinion series for South African National Environment Month, identifying the scope of our ecological challenges, their connections with nature conservation, and offering solutions.
