The critical need to protect Namibia’s environment

Namibia is one of the few countries in the world where protection of the environment is enshrined in its highest law, the constitution. This clear indicator shows how seriously the government of Namibia takes preservation of its natural environment.

Article 95 (l) of Namibia’s Constitution provides the basis for environmental protection to guide and formulate policies, legislation and programmes which aim to preserve and maintain biodiversity and ecosystems, and sustainably use Namibia’s natural resources for the benefit of all Namibians – now and in the future.

The government's responsibilities do not stop at preserving the environment. It has an obligation to enable Namibia’s socioeconomic development by growing the economy and establishing new industries to effect positive change and prospects for its people. Despite having made significant strides in improving people’s lives since independence in 1990, Namibia still ranks as the second most unequal society in the world in terms of wealth and income distribution. The government recognises the need to accelerate economic growth to address these inequalities through the Harambee Prosperity Plan II (HPPII), the sixth National Development Plan (NDP6) and Vision 2030.

HPPII sets out an initiative to harness the power and potential of Namibia’s exceptional renewable energy resources to drive green industrial development, including supplying green hydrogen and its derivatives to global markets to help decarbonise countries around the world. NDP6, which covers the final five-year stretch to Vision 2030, will further anchor the green hydrogen sector development ambitions.

As part of this strategy, the government tendered out two sites that it selected within the Tsau //Khaeb (formerly Sperrgebiet) National Park (TKNP), in the //Karas Region, for the development of large scale green hydrogen projects. This is where my company, Hyphen, intends to contribute, having been awarded the rights by the government (subject to necessary environmental and other approvals) to develop Namibia’s first large-scale green hydrogen-to-ammonia project.

Opportunities for green industrialisation

Hyphen’s green hydrogen project aims to help the world decarbonise, cutting five to six million tonnes equivalent of carbon dioxide a year and simultaneously creating opportunities for green industrialisation in Namibia. Clearly, the development of a green hydrogen economic sector and the global drive to net zero cannot be at the expense of the TKNP’s ecosystems and biodiversity. For Namibia to grow, we must strike a balance between protecting the environment and enabling economic development.

For those who haven’t visited Namibia, the TKNP or our project site, it’s hard to imagine the sheer scale and size of the country, the 35th largest and second least densely populated country in the world, with a surface area of 824 000 square kilometres - much of which is arid and uninhabited with varied levels of biodiversity sensitivity. Almost half of the country is under some form of conservation management. That’s an area bigger than Germany, Europe’s fourth largest country.

National parks account for just under half of Namibia’s protected land, of which the TKNP accounts for 15%. In comparison, the maximum physical footprint of Hyphen’s project within the TKNP is anticipated to be less than 0.7%. Hyphen has significant flexibility to design the project to avoid the most sensitive areas.

Impact avoidance is one of the key principles guiding the design of the project. Based on the ministry of environment, forestry and tourism’s current TKNP management plan, which classifies the park in terms of biodiversity sensitivity, around 90% of the project’s footprint would be within the lowest sensitivity land category. Any work on sites where avoidance of important biodiversity is simply not possible would be undertaken with the utmost care, guided by a bespoke biodiversity action plan, which specifies strict impact mitigation measures, including effectiveness monitoring and adaptive management.

Highest standards

From the inception of Hyphen’s project, we have recognised the uniqueness of the ecosystems in the TKNP and the need to design our project in harmony with these systems. Hyphen is committed to developing the project not only in accordance with Namibia’s constitution and environmental legislation, but also to the highest international standards - most notably the International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standard 6 on Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Management of Living Natural Resources, which is widely recognised as the benchmark for global best practice.

Hyphen has recruited its own team of environmental specialists and enlisted an external team of Namibia’s and Africa’s most experienced and knowledgeable environmental experts to advise and carry out studies on the most environmentally responsible ways to develop the project. Hyphen also appointed global environmental consulting firm SLR as its environmental practitioner to guide the project through the process.

Namibia’s legislated environmental process entails carrying out an environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA), which can be divided into three phases: Screening, scoping and impact assessment.

To date, Hyphen has carried out screening work, field work aimed at improving its understanding of the environmental baseline and planning for the scoping and impact assessment phases. The reason for this significant amount of early phase ESIA work is because we recognised that a 'normal' ESIA approach would be inadequate given the scale and complexity of the project and sensitivity of the environment.

The early baseline work comprised extensive ecology fieldwork to help Hyphen design the ESIA process and inform the design of the project to ensure that we avoid the most sensitive areas in the TKNP, such as rocky outcrops (including inselbergs), where biodiversity tends to cluster. We intend to follow an approach where the environmental sensitivity guides the placement of infrastructure, with solar generation infrastructure, which has the largest land requirement, to be located in areas of least or lesser importance for conservation

We firmly believe that avoidance is the first step in the process of reducing the project’s environmental impact to an absolute minimum. After the formal commencement of the ESIA process in the coming weeks, we will seek feedback from local communities and environmental groups, building on the environmental stakeholder roadshows Hyphen has hosted since early 2022.

Hyphen has also engaged stakeholders on the socioeconomic and development impacts of the project, by publishing notices and news stories in newspapers and online. Hyphen has held roadshows and workshops across the country, covering nine of Namibia’s 14 regions to date.

Working closely with the government and other key stakeholders, Hyphen has an enormous responsibility to protect one of Namibia’s precious national parks while enabling the country's continued economic growth through development of its first large-scale green hydrogen project. Hyphen’s goal is to establish the benchmark model for sustainable and equitable development - not only in Namibia, but across the African continent. This challenge is critical and not unique to Namibia. As the world strives toward net zero to ensure a world for future generations, the global collective challenge is to achieve this goal without compromising environmental preservation or sacrificing sustainable economic development.

I speak for the whole Hyphen team when I say we want to work with all stakeholders for whom preserving the environment is fundamental. We are looking forward to getting out and about to speak with people and organisations locally, nationally and internationally about how we can develop our project and ensure progress, while putting the environment first in every decision we make.

**Marco Raffinetti is the CEO of Hyphen Hydrogen Energy.