INTEGRATED APPROACHES ACROSS GEF FOCAL AREAS.

A DOMINICAN REPUBLIC CASE:DEMONSTRATING SUSTAINABLE

LAND MANAGEMENT IN THE UPPER SABANA YEGUA WATERSHED

LD/OP 15 UNDP/GEF/SUR FUTURO PROJECT.

Domingo Marte

SABANA YEGUA WATERSHED

• A territory of 166,000 hectares. Consists of the catchments of three rivers (Yaque del Sur, Grande del Medio and Las Cuevas). 48% of the territory is occupied by two protected areas, seriously threaten.

TOPOGRAPHY

• Mountainous, ranging from 400 to 1640 m.a.s.l. A wide diversity of climatic conditions, ranging from 725 mm to 2,000 mm of annual rainfall.

MICRO-BIOCLIMATIC REGIONS

• The extreme altitude gradient and rugged topography give rise to a complicated mosaic of 8 distinct micro-bioclimatic regions ranging from Subtropical Dry Forest to Montane Wet Forest.

Social Issues

• 77,000 persons, living in around 100 villages

• 80-100% of households in the communities living in poverty.

• No electric service in the majority of the communities.

• Most households do not have access to clean water, water sanitation services or solid waste collection, placing them at risk from water-borne diseases.

Social Issues(cont.)

• Farmers are heavily dependent on precarious subsistence agriculture, with limited access to markets, opportunities for employment and sources of alternative income.

• Almost all of the area outside of protected area system is deforested, being dedicated to agriculture and grazing activities.

ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC VALUES OF THE

WATERSHED• Provides irrigation, electricity and potable

water to more than 600,000 persons downstream.

• Carbon storage, biodiversity reservoir, production of water, climate balance, and others.

INTERLINKAGES: A new push for discussions.

• Linkages between human activities and environmental themes has been discussed and documented for a long time.

• STAP report about interlinkages– Pertinent questions to project designers to

ensure interlinkages are addressed.– Screen project activities for positive or

negative interactions with other focal areas.

The priority agenda

• Keep learning how to best manage interlinkages at the operational level, through integrated project approaches. To derive local and global environmental benefits, promote sustainable development, and meet human needs.

SY PROJECT DESIGN INTERLINKAGES BECAME

EVIDENT

• Problem tree

• Threat Analysis (threat, root causes and barriers)

• Logical framework

• Need to invest quality time and effort.

Interlinkages identified right at the start .

• Main Problem: Degradation of soil and vegetation resources in the Upper Sabana Yegua Watershed System leads to increased vulnerability to environmental shocks, decreased agricultural production, reduction in access to basic services (water and electricity), demographic instability, loss of carbon reserves and loss of ecosystem resilience”.

Main Threats

• i) Conversion of forest and shade coffee to other land uses, which has left 70% of non-protected areas without tree cover;

• ii) Application of inappropriate land use and damaging agriculture and grazing practices on steep lands (e.g burning, hillside tillage, and reduced fallow).

Main root causes

• i) Farmers with limited access to financial capital tend to favour land management options to look for short term returns for a minimum of investment, and risks.

• ii) In most cases they have limited knowledge of production technologies.

• iii)The potential to generate and apply alternative technologies is constrained by the limited understanding of farmers and the institutions (both governmental and NGOs) which support them.

Main barriers

• Insuficient and inadequately developed and applied policies, limited institutional capacity, limited human and social capital at local level, lack of access to adequate and appropriate finance and incentives,

Goal and Objectives

• Project Goal: “Promotion of sustainable development of the human and natural resources of the Upper Sabana Yegua Watershed System”.

• Project Objective: “To promote the sustainable land management in the Upper Sabana Yegua Watershed System, in order to achieve global environmental benefits within the context of sustainable development and poverty reduction”.

3. Relationship to GEF operational areas and focus.

Designers alignment.• Alignment of design team: Crucial step to

educating the team to reach conclusions about the interlinkages.

• Consensus was easily reached about project activities to reverse the effects of land degradation in order to maintain and enhance ecosystem integrity, stability, functions and services, thus qualifying under the GEF OP #15 .

SY Design Team Alignment

• Agreement to prefer native species for reforestation; use of multi-species planting; preference of IPM. Envisioned local and global benefits : improve water quantity and quality, flood reduction, improve biodiversity(through the promotion of a biodiversity-friendly landscape and the reduction of pressures on protected areas); climate change (through the promotion of carbon storage by increasing perennial component in the landscape) and international waters (through reductions in the sediment load entering the Caribbean Sea).

Environmental actions and poverty• Operational linkages between environmental

actions and poverty were difficult to translate into activities, due to insufficient understanding of what poverty really meant under the context of these type of projects, fear to cross the boundaries of OP#15 to the GEF operational area #12, and potential funding constraints from GEF for social activities. Later, poverty alleviation activities were designed through better access and quality improvement of education, health, energy, housing, potable water and income generating activities, linked to environmental services rendered by the population. The GODR agreed to co-finance the social activities.

Ensuring interlinkages across the implementation process.

• Interlinkages thought out at the project design phase will greatly increase the possibility of ground synergies within environmental issues and these, with social factors. But in long-term and multidisciplinary projects, some kind of participatory planning and coordinating structure, coupled with appropriate methods and processes to obtain integrated planning, may be needed to keep and enhance interlinkages during implementation.

A PLANNING & COORDINATION FRAMEWORK FOR SY.

• Division of the watershed into 8 administrative zones

• Establishment of a participatory structure comprised of a community development committee, a zone development committee, a watershed committee and a steering committee at the ministerial level. Sur Futuro Foundation as an equidistant private organization, will bring together different government and non-government institutions.

A planning & coordination(cont)

• Placement of a zone coordinator ( will be the first to be trained in integrated approaches) on each zone.

• Continuous training of key personnel to work under the integrated approach. Emphasis will be put into the learning by doing.

A planning & coordination(cont.)• Preparation of an annual participatory zone

development plan to center project activities and carry out the necessary synergies with other focal areas or non-project activities. Not doubt, this will be the most important product to obtain, which will be progressively improved as personnel gain more experience and the M & E retrofeed the planning process and content. Collection of disaggregated statistics will be enhanced.

M & E will rely heavily on the structure and process outlined before. Lessons harvested will serve to establish linkages with other national and international projects.

FINAL REMARKS • Interlinkages and integrated approaches should

be an entry way to GEF projects, as well as a work culture to be instilled in project designers and implementers.

• The set of questions proposed by the STAP report to examine interlinkages, are quite pertinent in designing a GEF project.

• The alignment of the project design team is a crucial step toward interlinkages.

• An early identification of the problem tree, the careful development of a threats analysis and logical framework should move project designers to address interlinkages through proper activities.

FINAL REMARKS• In long-term complex projects, the need for

some kind of participatory planning process aimed to yield an integrated plan is a requisite to maintain and enhance interlinkages through implementation.

• Interlinkages are a fact of life. The GEF focal areas have been designed to facilitate specialization and administration on those areas, but in the ideal and silent undisturbed world, the living organisms and the functional process keep their synergies, without the knowledge of the compartmentalization. Perhaps in most of the focal areas we should strive for a common core of interlinkages assessments and operational mechanisms.

FINAL REMARKS• Many projects have failed or come short of

fulfilling their objectives as a result of the lack of integrated approaches. The search for integrated approaches (mainly in rural development projects which were heavily funded three decades ago) were at one time abandoned due to their institutional difficulties. Now that we are talking about Human Development, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Framework and other complex proposals, those approaches are needed more than ever.

THANK YOU.