INK Environmental Sustainability Booklet [19 MB] - Durban

ink sustainability handbook
Trees and plants make shade that cool down our streets, houses and gardens,
and makes a more comfortable and pretty environment for us to live in – BUT
where there are no trees and plants it is hot and dusty.
So, the environment produces many different goods (like water and wood) and
services (like protection from floods, and fertile soils for agriculture) that people need
in order to have a good, safe place to live and work. If we damage the environment
by taking too much from it, or by putting too much of our waste into it, the amount
and quality of the goods and services that it can produce will decrease - but where
we manage to achieve a balance between what the environment can produce and
what we take from it/put back into it – then we have a thing called ‘Environmental
Sustainability’. This is important if we want to make sure that we protect and
enhance the quality of our living environments for ourselves and our children.
The INK area faces some special challenges when planning how we can achieve
Environmental Sustainability. One of these challenges is the high density of people
living in the area: 18% of eThekwini’s population is squeezed into the INK area,
which contains just 3% of eThekwini’s land area. This means that there are, on
average, about 7,000 people living in each square kilometre of INK, which is six
times higher than anywhere else in eThekwini.
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