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NGD Enhances and Sustains Productivity and Ecosystem Functions

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Transforming Ethiopia’s Degraded Environments for Healthier Lives

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Geoinformation-based Service for the Greening Initiative

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Rural Landscape Greening

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A Few Words On The Project

Ethiopia is facing multiple challenges for sustainable development. As per Climate resilient Green Economy Strategy (CRGE) actions on the ground needs to be stepped up to meet the rapidly escalating challenges. Pursuant to these challenges, and hope for renewal of Ethiopia,
HE Prime Minister Dr Abiy recently launched nationwide greening initiative. This includes tree planting in the rural and urban landscapes including urban beautification program for Addis Ababa and other major cities.

This initiative would be an extension of the CRGE and would therefore help to ensure decreasing per capita emissions by 64% or more. In the long term, Ethiopia intends to achieve its vision of becoming carbon-neutral, with the mid-term goal of attaining middle income status. The reduction of emissions from the forest sector is a key component towards Ethiopia
fulfilling its targets for greenhouse emission. Accordingly, a national greening action program is designed, and the goal of this program is to transform Ethiopia’s degraded environments to relish their full value of beneficial functions in livelihood support and ecosystem functions.
More objectively, this initiative will promote sustainable and competitive tree-based production systems in the rural and urban landscapes of Ethiopia through coordinated, aligned and harmonized interventions to guide rapid greening of rural and urban Ethiopian landscapes by mobilizing human, institutional and technical capacities at all levels.

How It Helps For the Development Goal

The National Greening Action Program is designed to step-up rural and urban greening in Ethiopia. The rural landscape greening is needed to rehabilitate degraded lands and ecosystems, increase productivity of land and soil, improve the life of important infrastructures such as water, irrigation and hydro dams, conserve the biodiversity, sequester carbon, and sustain the livelihoods of the rapidly growing population. Ethiopia has about 18 million hectares of degraded land potentially suitable for afforestation and reforestation. These areas can be covered with extensive watershed management practices to obtain optimum production within minimum disturbance to the environment and focusing mainly on the management of these areas to slow down the rate of siltation in the water reservoirs and limit the occurrence of potentially damaging flash flooding in the river courses. The watershed management programs based on lessons learned over the past several decades are a new opportunity to reverse land degradation, reduce
environmental pollution and increase the level of water use. On the other hand, many of the agricultural production systems require integrated agroforestry practices that fulfil all the important livelihood support systems: food, wood, feed and cash income. There are diverse agroforestry experiences in the country that can benefit the current initiative.

Moreover, investments in forest establishment and management is required to ensure Ethiopia can supply its growing wood demand, ensure domestic substitution of wood imports while reducing pressure on the remaining natural forests. Currently, Ethiopia is importing nearly half of its current industrial wood demand, spending approximately USD 124 million annually (NFSDP, 2017) 1. Therefore, Ethiopia should undertake large-scale plantations in addition to protecting the existing 17.35 million hectares of forest.

The new national forest sector development program of Ethiopia has targeted for 310,000ha of
industrial plantation alone (NFSDP, 2017). Out of this target, the current initiative can help to achieve critical targets through the various approaches. On the other hand, the current rapid urbanization is creating demanding societies in the urban settings. Most towns and cities in the nation are without properly planned green spaces. Lack of green spaces and parks generated environmental challenges. Therefore. urban green areas and forestry should be managed to improve air quality and mitigate national and global climate change.

In addition to poorly planned and congested environment, urban areas in Ethiopia suffer due poor solid waste management; polluted rivers from domestic waste water, industrial pollution, urban storm water; lack of green areas, buffer zones of streams and heavily encroached rivers and streams due to illegal settlement, deforestation, and lack of regulatory systems.

Therefore, to overcome the aforementioned challenges of urban areas, the urban greening has been incorporated in the current initiative. The initiative in urban and peri-urban spaces include cluster of five categories covering cleaning of urban environment, urban green infrastructure development and beautifying cities with enforcing existing policies and strategies.

FEATURED INSTITUTES

OUR STATISTICS

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Regions

Plantation place Identification has been done in all regions.

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Available Trees

 has been identified throughout the country.

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Federal Regions

Plantation place identification has been done in federal regions.