Africa-Press – Namibia. PROGRESS on the implementation of the communication plan of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will be one of the issues to be reviewed at the upcoming 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the convention.
The conference will be held in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, from 9 to 21 May.
It will also review progress made on the UNCCD’s Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification.
According to the Bonn-based UNCCD secretariat, the conference at the 14th CoP to the UNCCD in India in 2019 requested the secretariat to review the communication plan, identify key audiences and propose relevant options for increasing awareness of the convention’s objectives.
The secretariat was also asked to actively contribute to the implementation of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and to enhance media engagement, develop partnerships with media organisations to expand outreach to non-English speaking audiences, and to raise the profile of the UNCCD outreach programmes and products.
The Abidjan conference will be held under the theme ‘Land. Life. Legacy: From Scarcity to Prosperity’.
The Namibian government has identified desertification and land degradation as some of the main challenges the country is faced with.
However, as an active party to the UNCCD, Namibia has come up with a number of measures to address drought and land degradation. Namibia’s minister of environment, forestry and tourism, Pohamba Shifeta, has embraced the concept of land degradation neutrality, which the country has mainstreamed into policies and programmes.
Namibia’s third national action plan to implement the UNCCD (2014 -2024), says major causes of desertification and land degradation in the country includes population pressure, poverty, overgrazing, pollution, the unsustainable use of water resources, climate change, and the inadequate application of technology for dry-land production.
Land degradation, which leads to desertification and robs the soil of fertility, is steadily marching across large tracts of the globe, especially in Africa.
Environmental commissioner Timoteus Mufeti says as a member of the international community, Namibia is a party to a number of international environmental agreements, including the UNCCD.
He says apart from making a significant contribution to these agreements, the country has also benefited greatly from participating in such multilateral initiatives.
“Such support includes financial, technical and political support,” Mufeti says.
Abou Bamba, one of the members of the conference’s organising committee, says the theme for the conference is a call to action to ensure land continues to benefit present and future generations.
The UNCCD was adopted on 17 June 1994, and came into force on 26 December 1996.
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