| Overview : The project was designed to contribute to the forest, savannah and rangeland of Namibia’s northern areas to pilot an integrated landscape management approach, reducing poverty through sustainable nature-based livelihoods, protecting and restoring forests as carbon sinks, and promoting Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN). Project overall objective: To promote an integrated landscape management approach in key agricultural and forest landscapes, reducing poverty through sustainable nature-based livelihoods, protecting and restoring forests as carbon sinks, and promoting Land Degradation Neutrality. Project Outcomes: - Functioning intra-governmental coordination to guide implementation and monitoring of global targets
- Enhanced sustainable land and forest management, biodiversity conservation and livelihoods in target landscapes
- Enhanced access to finance, technical assistance and market information to pilot and scale up the integrated landscape management approach and sustainable enterprises
- Project results are tracked, and the impact of interventions evaluated, with learning captured and shared
The project duration is 6 years and 3 months (September 2019 to August 2025) with a total budget of USD 10,823,744 and planned co-financing of USD 74,112,844. The project objectives are achieved by a strategy which develops national and regional capacity for an integrated approach to planning and managing landscapes, monitoring spatial results in reporting on multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), and for compliance with environmental legislation (Component 1). The project works in a set of focal landscapes to demonstrate how to achieve the related and overlapping spatial targets of these MEAs, implementing the Integrated Regional Land Use Plans through fine-scale participatory land-use planning and management with communities, businesses, and local government and traditional authorities. This landscape-level work will enable a demonstration of the impacts of integrated landscape management for rural development and wealth creation, through sustainable land and forest management interventions on the ground with communities, and nature-based enterprise development (Component 2). Innovative financial mechanisms will be put in place for scaling up nationally (Component 3), based on capturing and sharing of lessons learnt and impact achieved through the new integrated landscape management approach (Component 4). The project draws together a wide range of stakeholders from the public sector for intragovernmental coordination, in partnership with the private sector, civil society, research organizations, and donor and technical partners, to bring about a shift in the way Namibia approaches rural development, coordinating actions to reverse environmental degradation and maximize nature-based livelihoods. COVID-19 situation, first cases of COVID-19 in Namibia were registered in March 2020, and the government implemented a national lockdown in the following month. During the crisis, the economy contracted by 11% in 2020 according to the National Statistical Agency (NSA)[1]. Significant impact was recorded in the tourism sector with 96.5% of tourism businesses adversely affected, and the manufacturing and construction sectors contracted by 9.2% and 5.7% respectively in 2020[2]. UNECA estimates show that the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to increase poverty levels from 17.2% to 19.5% in Namibia[3]. From 3 January 2020 to 9 June 2022, there have been 167,565 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 4,040 deaths, reported to WHO[4]. As of 1 January 2022, a total of 643,829 vaccine doses have been administered. |
