Stakeholders come together to save the environment
Honourable Pohamba Shifeta, Minister of Environment and Tourism said that valuing the true worth of nature and using it as a basis for decision and policy making is an exciting prospect and high priority of the ministry.
He said this at the second annual stakeholder dialogue for the Ministry of Environment and Tourism’s Resource Mobilisation for Biodiversity conservation (ResMob) project held last week.
ResMob aims to strengthen Namibia’s capacity to mobilise technical, human and financial resources for biodiversity conservation.
Shifeta said that they need the support of their partner line ministries to make this a reality and that it is in their interests to know, understand and monitor regularly the value of our natural resource base.
“This is why we have put in place the Environmental Economics network and I hope this network will assist us to overcome some of the challenges we are experiencing in data collection and coordination,” said Shifeta.
He said that he is aware that capacity constraints are a major concern in this area, but yet this is a field which is very much likely to grow in importance in the coming years.
“Let us be prepared and pro-active to capacitate our economists and students in this field and I am pleased to see the agenda of this dialogue meeting covers a wide range of exciting topics and research in the field of environmental economics,” he added.
Dr Michael Humavindu, Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Industrialization, Trade and SME Development emphasised on the link between industrialisation and the environment and said that a rapid and sustained industrialisation may yield the improvement of efficiency and productivity.
“However it may also yield undesirable externalities which could include societal instability imbalance,inequality, damage of ecological environment and in turn these negative factors hamper the capability of sustainable development of industrialization and economic growth of the economic system,” he said.
Meanwhile, this project is jointly being implemented by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism in partnership with the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). The project will run until March 2017 and is being financed by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety. (BMUB).
