Protection and Management of Pakistan Wetlands Programme
Project Category: N/A
Donor Agency: GEF, UNDP, RNE, WWF-Network
Start Date: June 2005
Planned End Date: May 2012
Summary
The Pakistan Wetlands Programme fits well within Pakistan’s development goals by aiming to promote equitable sharing of natural resources, securing rights-of-access, especially for poor communities, diversifying livelihoods, improving the income earning potential of stakeholder communities and creating incentives for sustainable wetlands management. The Programme will advance the GoP’s recent initiatives for devolution of power to provincial and local levels by developing the capacity and wetlands management skills of provincial institutions and strengthening community-based organisations.
With support from the GEF, the proposed programme offers a proactive opportunity to create an enabling environment that is essential to conserve all of Pakistan’s wetlands. Further, the programme initiatives in four demonstration complexes provide a much-needed opportunity for the application of proven conservation methods and development of innovative regionally appropriate and sustainable approaches to address site-specific issues. Lessons generated within the programme will be relevant for ongoing wetlands conservation initiatives both within and outside Pakistan for evaluation and application to similar efforts in other regions and countries. Significant features of replicability are expected to include the approaches developed to integrate communities in wetlands management, providing alternate livelihoods to wetlands-dependent vulnerable groups and developing mechanisms for financial sustainability in a “resource strained” economy. Such issues confront wetlands conservation in other countries as well and the success of measures implemented under the Pakistan Wetlands Programme will provide useful guidance to the international community.
Objective
The immediate objectives of the project are:
- To create and maintain an enabling environment for effective and sustainable conservation of natural wetlands at federal, provincial / territorial, and local levels.
- To implement sustainable wetlands conservation at four representative sites that will serve as replicable models for sustainable nationwide wetlands conservation initiatives.
