Integrated Landscape Management
Project title: Integrated Landscape Management to Enhance Food Security and Ecosystem Resilience in Ethiopia
Country: Ethiopia
Implementing Partner: Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change
Management Arrangements: National Implementation Modality (NIM)
Brief project description:
Smallholder farming (cultivation and pastoralism) is the mainstay of Ethiopia’s economy across the six regions in which this project will be implemented. Farming takes place in often highly degraded and vulnerable environments where there is substantial loss of vegetation, associated erosion and declining soil fertility. Huge demand for natural capital including biomass fuels exacerbates environmental degradation and affects food production. This project proposes an integrated approach that brings together capacity to achieve food security with the need to restore and sustainably manage key environmental resources. It does this through three interrelated components: Component 1 ensures effective multi-stakeholder platforms are in place to support the dissemination and uptake of integrated approaches; Component 2 develops specific approaches and puts in place effective mechanisms to scale up across target sites and, more widely, in the country; and Component 3 establishes systematic monitoring, assessment, learning and knowledge management mechanism that supports influencing at a wider scale in Ethiopia – and via the Regional Hub project[1]– across other SSA countries under the IAP. Infusing all components is a commitment to gender-responsive development, in which women.
Programme Outcome: By 2020 key Government institutions at federal and regional levels including cities are better able to plan, implement and monitor priority climate change mitigation
Objective
The goal of this project is: To enhance long-term sustainability and resilience of food production systems by addressing the environmental drivers of food insecurity in Ethiopia. The overarching focus is on integrated landscape management (ILM) to achieve food production resilience in landscapes under pressure. ILM combines land management choices and Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM) with water- and climate-smart agriculture, value chain support and gender responsiveness.
Given the complex and interrelated development challenges described above, fostering sustainability and resilience of food security in Ethiopia will require effective multi-stakeholder platforms to support uptake of integrated approaches, the scaling up of best practices and proven approaches and technologies, and systematic monitoring, assessment, learning and knowledge management (generation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge and experience).
The wider analytical framework of this project distinguishes four interrelated dimensions of resilience, namely agro-ecological, ecological, livelihood and institutional. In addition it recognizes four cross-cutting strategies which are instrumental to building pathways to resilience—diversity and complementarity, gender equality, knowledge and learning, integration and the achievement of synergies.
The project’s theory of change (TOC) has three complimentary impact pathways: 1) the first directly addresses the institutional frameworks needed for enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services within food production systems. It builds the right enabling environments for reducing natural resource degradation, whilst contributing to the productivity and sustainability of the agricultural systems; 2) the second addresses ways of scaling up approaches at a landscape level that deliver more resilient and productive landscapes, including alternative livelihoods that reduce pressures on natural systems; and 3) focuses on ensuring monitoring and assessment, and learning and knowledge management, supports realisation of the project’s interventions and effective impact on the behaviours and approaches of a wider constituency of those involved in developing policy and practice in the region and more widely under the other 11 IAP countries.
Scaling up best practices in Integrated Natural Resource Management
The second impact pathway involves adaptation of food production systems to enhance productivity and increase capacity for transformation into non-farm livelihoods in areas where there is serious landscape degradation. Water scarcity, climate variability and change, gender disparities and inadequate and non-existent value chains and markets are critical factors under this pathway. The approach involves adoption of climate- and water-smart technologies and practices, index insurance, strengthening existing and establishing new value chains and market linkages, as well as supporting more effective off-farm livelihood strategies. A key additional element involves recognizing the importance of strong gender-responsive programing, particularly around off-farm income-generating activities.
Assumptions
- There are already effective climate- and water-smart agriculture packages that assist with adaptation of agriculture to climate change while mitigating GHG emissions and enhancing food security;
- There are appropriate weather-indexed insurance products that can be made available by the private sector and producers will be willing to adopt and pay an insurance premium to reduce losses from crop failure and livestock deaths due to weather-related risks;
- There is significant scope for value addition and value chain development and market linkages in the site locations;
- There is significant scope for off-farm/non-farm livelihood opportunities in and outside of the project sites, especially for rural youth, women and landless sections of the population;
- Current policy and institutional settings are conducive and provide strategic support for new streams of livelihoods and movement to areas in which to establish these livelihoods; and
- New livelihoods are viable and sustainable and can provide income that enables access to adequate food, with a key focus on women and youth.