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As a result of the large-scale degradation and loss of wetlands throughout Africa, the focus on wetland rehabilitation and management has grown substantially (Kotze et al., 2009). With legislation and policy at both the national and provincial level providing clear support and direction for rehabilitation and management, there are no excuses for negligence in South Africa (Kotze et al., 2009). Nevertheless, people continue to reclaim and alter South African wetlands either through changing the timing, quality and magnitude of wetland flow inputs as a result of upstream developments or by overexploiting the invaluable resources these systems provide for financial gain (Schultz, 2005). The reason for this is an underestimation of the economic value of a healthy wetland. This has been pointed out by Nature, a well-respected scientific journal, which calculated the global net worth of all wetlands to be approximately $ 4 trillion annually (DWA, 2005). On a national scale, a preliminary economic valuation of the ecosystem services provided by intact system within South Africa calculated that approximately 7 % of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is generated by maintaining untransformed natural systems, either via inputs to productive activities and welfare, or the losses avoided by retaining these systems (Turpie et al., 2017). This has been calculated to be more than three times the value of the forestry, agriculture and fishing sector, which contributes an estimated 2.2% of the South African GDP (Turpie et al., 2017).

This exorbitant amount can be attributed to the numerous functions of wetlands that ultimately regulate and protect the water resource and supply valuable ecosystem services to the surrounding natural and anthropogenic environments. Without these ecosystem services, the economic growth and productivity within the broader economic sectors would not be able to sustain the human population, which is growing at an exponential rate. Services such as; flood attenuation, sediment-tapping, phosphate and nitrate removal, streamflow regulation, carbon sequestration, toxicant removal and the maintenance of biodiversity all contribute to the value of an individual wetland and the combination of terrestrial and aquatic systems toward invaluable ecosystems. The ungoverned and unmonitored historic and current land-use practices within the numerous economic sectors all have the potential to have detrimental impacts on the invaluable ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide to South Africa and the globe. This encourages and warrants the desperate need to prevent, mitigate and rehabilitate the impacts of these land-use practices on the delicate and invaluable aquatic terrestrial systems.