City of Masvingo (Environmental and Natural Resources Conservation) By-laws, 2025

These wide-ranging by-laws, made under section 229 of the Urban Councils Act, put the City of Masvingo's environmental duties into enforceable form. They cover a local environmental action plan, grazing and cultivation areas, waste management sites, environmental impact assessments, rehabilitation on abandonment of a project, tree cutting and forest produce, extraction of gravel, sand, stone and clay, brick making, protection of water sources, biodiversity, commercial timber logging, wildlife and indigenous plants, air pollution, solid and effluent waste, landfills, littering, hazardous substances, mining and panning, and genetic resources.

Fire control is specific. No one may burn growing or standing vegetation without lodging a notice of intention to burn with the council, traditional leaders, the environmental sub-committee, EMA, the Forestry Commission, occupiers of adjoining land or the nearest police station, in line with section 67 of the Forestry Act. Every land owner or occupier must put fire protection measures in place before 31 July each year, must put out any fire on their land, and everyone in the vicinity of a fire has a duty to help extinguish it regardless of who started it.

Invasive alien species must be cleared. Occupiers must keep land free of the species listed in the First Schedule, the council may order clearing, and where there is an imminent threat to the environment, livestock or human health the council may clear the land itself and recover its costs from the owner or occupier.

Wetlands are protected. Anyone intending to reclaim, drain, drill, tunnel, introduce exotic species, cultivate or destroy natural vegetation on a wetland, within 30 metres of a stream bank or of the high flood level of a water storage work, or in the bed or banks of a river, must first furnish the council with an EMA licence issued under the Environmental Management (Environmental Impact Assessment and Ecosystems Protection) Regulations, 2007.

The by-laws carry a Second Schedule of fees and a Third Schedule of penalties. The extracted text available here was truncated before those schedules, so the amounts should be read in the instrument itself.