In the 2026 Estimates of National Expenditure, one sentence describes how South Africa's national parks agency earns its living, and it says the opposite of the table printed directly beneath it. The sentence puts 16.2 per cent of the agency's medium term revenue down to tourism and the rest down to transfers from its department. The table has those two the other way round, it adds up, and its own percentage column prints that same 16.2 per cent against the transfers.
Vote 32 pays for forestry, fisheries and the environment out of one appropriation, split across nine programmes. The whole vote comes to 9,127.4 million rand in 2026/27, rising to 10,157.4 million by 2028/29, after audited outturns of 8,849.3 million in 2022/23, 9,495.2 million in 2023/24 and 8,639.6 million in 2024/25. Programme five, Biodiversity and Conservation, is 1,427.7 million of the 2026/27 figure, which the Treasury records as 15.6 per cent of the vote. That is the line most people mean when they ask what South Africa spends on nature, and reading it as spending on nature is the first mistake available.
One budget line with three tenants
Of the biodiversity programme's 1,427.7 million rand, 1,146.5 million is classified as transfers and subsidies and 1,140.0 million of that goes to three public entities: 543.4 million to the biodiversity institute, 433.4 million to the parks agency and 163.2 million to the wetland park authority. What the department retains to do biodiversity work of its own is 280.8 million of current payments and 0.4 million of capital. Across the three years to 2028/29 the programme is 4,461.2 million and transfers and subsidies are 3,583.8 million of it, so roughly four fifths of the budget line is a conduit.
Scale matters here more than composition. Over the same three years the vote's environmental programmes line, which runs the public employment schemes, comes to 8,016.2 million rand, and the department says it intends to generate 71,880 work opportunities and 45,873 full time equivalent positions inside that programme at a projected cost of eight billion. That is 27.5 per cent of a three year vote of 29,136.0 million, which makes it the largest of the nine programmes and leaves it well short of a majority. Set it against the 877.4 million the department has left for biodiversity work of its own once the entity transfers are taken out, and the ratio is a little over nine to one: one programme against another programme's residue, not a measure of the department as a whole.
Two agencies, two ways of paying for a park
The parks agency and the biodiversity institute sit under the same budget line and earn their money in almost opposite proportions. In 2024/25 the parks agency's total revenue was 4,103.0 million rand. Non-tax revenue accounted for 3,071.4 million of that, of which the sale of goods and services other than capital assets was 2,833.3 million, and transfers received came to 1,031.6 million. Three quarters of the money the agency spends is money it takes at a gate, a reception desk or a restaurant till. It closed the year with a surplus of 311.0 million.
The biodiversity institute's audited statements for the same twelve months tell a different story on a different accounting basis. Total revenue was 1,064,409,761 rand. Exchange transactions produced 186,637,076 of it, admission fees being 140,403,276 of that, while non-exchange transactions produced 877,772,685, of which government grants and subsidies were 606,310,454. The institute earns about a sixth of its income and receives the rest. It draws 1,460,563 visitors a year across eleven botanical gardens and two zoological campuses, more than 668,259 of them to one garden in the Western Cape. And it is the institute, not the parks agency, that took the larger transfer from the biodiversity vote in 2024/25: 548.7 million rand against 398.7 million. That transfer and the 606,310,454 of grants in the institute's own accounts are different figures on different bases, and neither document reconciles them.
Where the paragraph and the table part company
Which brings the argument back to that sentence. It reads: "The entity expects to generate 16.2 per cent (R2.2 billion) of its revenue over the medium term through tourism activities in the national parks and the remainder through transfers from the department." Add the transfer rows of the table underneath it: 695.7 plus 720.7 plus 742.7 is 2,159.1 million, which prints as 2.2 billion, and total revenue across the same three years is 13,364.6 million, of which 2,159.1 million is 16.2 per cent. The sale of goods and services rows sum to 10,365.5 million, or 77.6 per cent. Both quantities in the sentence belong to the transfers, not to the tourism.
The reader need not even do the addition. The same table carries a column giving each row's share of the three year total, and it prints 16.2 per cent against transfers received and 83.8 per cent against the non-tax revenue that holds the trading income. Those two figures sit four lines below the sentence that reverses them. The 2024 edition of the same document, describing the same entity in words otherwise identical, gets it right: 79.7 per cent, or 7.5 billion rand, on tourism and the remainder on transfers. Whatever happened between the two editions happened to the prose and not to the data. It is a small error in a large document, and it matters only because it sits on the one paragraph a reader in a hurry would quote, the plain language summary of an entity whose balance sheet most readers will never open.
A spike, and an underspend with an address
The transfer to the parks agency swung hard: 444.5 million rand in 2022/23, 1,124.0 million in 2023/24, then 398.7 million, 416.6 million and 433.4 million. The Treasury explains the drop in the earlier edition rather than the later one, and the explanation is a single line item, a one off allocation of 700 million rand in 2023/24 against the infrastructure backlog. Read without that sentence, the series looks like a policy reversal. Read with it, the agency got a building grant once.
Against that, the department's own audited outturn for the biodiversity programme is almost boringly tight. Final appropriation 1,309,794 thousand rand, actual expenditure 1,305,833 thousand, underspend 3,961 thousand. All three entity transfers went out at exactly 100 per cent of budget, so every rand of the underspend sits in the five subprogrammes the department runs itself, and 2,823 thousand of it, more than two thirds, sits in one: Biodiversity Economy and Sustainable Use, which spent 30,556 thousand of the 33,379 thousand it was given. The one subprogramme charged with turning biodiversity into an industry is the one that could not spend its money.
A strategy gazetted as a draft
That subprogramme's instrument is the National Biodiversity Economy Strategy, whose revised text was published as Government Notice 4492 in Gazette 50279 on 8 March 2024. It sets four goals with dated impact statements. Consumptive use of game from extensive wildlife systems is to grow from 4.6 billion rand of gross domestic product in 2020 to 27.6 billion by 2036. Bioprospecting and biotrade are to grow from 1.85 billion to 11.6 billion over the same period through local beneficiation. Ecotourism businesses are to grow ten per cent a year while the conservation estate goes from 20 million hectares to 34 million by 2040, though the two additions the same sentence names, 4.2 million hectares of declared protected areas and 10 million of other effective area based conservation measures, come to 14.2 million rather than 14.
The enabler that deals with money is the third of four and contains seven actions, and what is striking is how few of them are instruments. They are to develop models for park and concession fees, to engage the private sector on partnerships, to build mechanisms for access to capital, to leverage existing funding streams, to gain approval for a trust fund, to develop financial mechanisms based on species and ecosystem outcomes, and to identify elements of natural capital accounting and ecosystem service payments that could be incorporated. The only sums the enabler names are other people's: a list of external funding streams running from 3.4 million to 10 million dollars, two of them Global Environment Facility grants, and a 100 million rand corporate commitment to accrediting traditional health practitioners. The trust fund action says in terms that the department is to lobby the Treasury to approve a fund proposed by the biodiversity institute. Two budgets later, the biodiversity economy subprogramme is 37.5 million rand, less than a tenth of the transfer the same page sends to the parks agency.
The estate, and the number left out of the sentence
The department's headline conservation output is land. In 2024/25 it targeted 90,000 hectares added to the conservation estate and reported 104,840.7393, exceeding the target by 14,840.7393, after 382,517.130 hectares in 2022/23 and 135,047.045 in 2023/24. The commitment ahead is 330,000 hectares over three years. The annual report's own summary of how that programme performed opens with a sentence that has the quantity missing from it, reading that during the financial year hectares of land were added to the conservation estate, with no number where the number should be. The figure is in the indicator table a few pages earlier, which is where a reader has to go.
Two other outputs from the same year are worth holding next to the strategy's ambitions. The annual report records six benefit-sharing agreements approved during 2024/25, and 158 previously disadvantaged businesses supported through training, market access, game donation and investment opportunities. The 2026 budget separately sets the department an objective of finalising at least fifteen such agreements over the three years ahead, so the six is a completed year in one document and the fifteen a forward target in another, not a score against it. Together they are what the department publishes as the measurable half of a strategy costed in billions.
One document would settle several of these questions. The parks agency publishes an annual report and audited financial statements of its own, and that document rather than a Treasury summary is where its tourism revenue is signed off. Its website answers automated requests with a bot challenge, so every parks figure above comes from the Treasury or from the department instead.
Sources
Every figure, date and deal name above is drawn from one of the documents below. Each was fetched and cached on the retrieval date shown.
- National Treasury, 2026 Estimates of National Expenditure, full volume. Vote 32 begins at printed page 640: the budget summary by programme, the vote expenditure table, the Biodiversity and Conservation subprogramme table, and the separate entity sections for the parks agency and the biodiversity institute with their own revenue statements and performance indicators https://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/National%20Budget/2026/ene/FullENE.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- National Treasury, 2024 Estimates of National Expenditure, Vote 32. The edition two budgets earlier, carrying the same entity section written the other way round, the explanation of the one-off infrastructure allocation, and the estate and occupancy indicators that the later edition drops https://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/National%20Budget/2024/ene/Vote%2032%20Environment,%20Forestry%20and%20Fisheries.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Annual Report 2024/25, Vote 32, as published on the national government portal. The audited outturn: final appropriation against actual expenditure for every subprogramme of the biodiversity vote, the transfer annexures, the conservation estate indicator with its target and its deviation, and the narrative summary of that programme https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202510/dffe-annualreport202425.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- South African National Biodiversity Institute, Annual Report 2024/25. The institute's audited statement of financial performance, split between exchange and non-exchange transactions, with admission fees on their own line, plus the visitor counts for the botanical and zoological gardens it runs https://www.sanbi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Annual-Report-2024-25.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Revised draft National Biodiversity Economy Strategy, Government Notice 4492, Government Gazette 50279, 8 March 2024. The gazetted text: four strategic goals with their impact statements and target years, the four enablers, and the seven actions under the enabler that deals with money https://www.dffe.gov.za/sites/default/files/legislations/nemba_draftbiodiversityeconomystrategy_g50279gon4492.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30