Targeting land degradation

A five-year project aimed at reducing and reversing degradation, desertification and deforestation of land and ecosystems in dryland will be funded by the Global Environmental Facility - to the value of more than N$110 million.

The project is titled ‘Integrated landscape management to reduce, reverse and avoid further degradation and support the sustainable use of natural resources in the Mopane-Miombo belt of northern Namibia’.

This according to national project coordinator Isak Kaholongo, who was speaking at a recently-held inception workshop of the dryland sustainable landscape impact programme, which took place in Rundu.

According to him, the project is being implemented by the environment and agriculture ministries as well as the Food and Agricultural Organisation.

“The project is currently at the implementation phase and is expected to end by April 2026.”

Kaholongo said it will be implemented in three landscapes in northern Namibia.

These are the Kunene-Cuvelai sub-basin landscapes in the Oshana, Omusati and Kunene regions - covering 600 844 hectares; the Etosha sub-basin landscape in Oshikoto over an area of 559 659 hectares, and the Okavango sub-basin landscape in Kavango East, covering 294 659 hectares.

Transformational shift

“To introduce and pilot a transformational shift towards sustainable, integrated management of multi-use dryland landscapes in northern Namibia, it is necessary to address the increasing land degradation in the Miombo-Mopane dry forest belt of northern Namibia, building on land-degradation neutrality principles.”

Kaholongo added that the project aims for the development of an enabling framework to apply land-degradation neutrality at national and landscape levels, to strengthen implementation and enable scaling out of sustainable land and forest management and to strengthen knowledge, learning and collaboration to support progress towards achieving national land-degradation neutrality targets.