- Environmental management and Climate Change
The Namibia Protected Landscape Conservation Areas Initiative (NAMPLACE) Project is designed to lift the barriers to establishment of a large-scale network of landscapes. In doing so, it meant to address threats to habitat and species loss on a landscape level approach, ensuring greater responsiveness to variability and seasonality issues around climate change. The project brought an additional 35 thousand square kilometres of land under collaborative management (double the original target) through arrangements designed to conserve biodiversity by establishing five Protected Landscape Conservation Areas (PLCAs). PLCAs were first and foremost managed for the full suite of biodiversity and landscape values, also to generate economic incentives for stakeholders in the landscape (with the feedback loop that the benefits derived from biodiversity further supported positive biodiversity management). The initiative was based on the recognition by Namibia’s Ministry of Environment & Tourism (MET) that protected areas that operate in isolation of its neighbours are likely to face resistance.
Overall, the evaluation found that the project is largely successful and can be considered an innovative example of co-management, Protected Area (PA)-neighbour relations, and multi-stakeholder landscape-level cooperation. The project achieved most of what it set out to do, delivering on 57% of its indicators fully, and 43% of its indicators partly. This includes important achievements such as: – 5 operational Protected Landscape Conservation Areas (PLCAs) established in very diverse areas of the country, anchored by national Protected Areas (PAs); – Guidance on fruitful park-neighbour relationships that was formalized through national policy; and – Co-management activities in 3/5 of the landscapes that enabled wildlife numbers to measurably increase during the project lifespan.