RFS gender teams are working to promote women’s empowerment in Ethiopia
04 November 2020
Project Name
Integrated Landscape Management to Enhance Food Security and Ecosystem Resilience
GEF Implementing Agency
UNDP
Objective
To enhance long-term sustainability and resilience of food production systems by addressing the environmental drivers of food insecurity in Ethiopia.
Project Targets
land under integrated and sustainable management
GHG emissions avoided or reduced
beneficiary households
Smallholder farming is the primary economic activity across the six regions in which the RFS Ethiopia project is implemented. Farming takes place in often highly degraded and vulnerable environments where there is substantial loss of vegetation, associated erosion and declining soil fertility. Rapidly growing populations and the associated demand for biomass fuels, water, and agricultural land accelerate environmental degradation and further threaten food production.
Land degradation makes Ethiopia particularly vulnerable to climate change and climate variability. Ethiopia has been experiencing recurrent drought since the El Niño weather event in 2015/2016. Most areas of Ethiopia haven’t experienced normal rainfall in years, leading to widespread hunger, malnutrition, and disease outbreaks.
The RFS Ethiopia project targets six regions—Amhara, SNNP, Oromia, Tigray, Afar and Somali—across two global biodiversity hotspots, Eastern Afromontane and Horn of Africa. The project approach combines land management choices and Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM) with water and climate-smart agriculture, value chain support and gender empowerment.
This project is structured around three principal components:
By mainstreaming integrated landscape management through markets and economic production systems, the project works to achieve ecosystem sustainability, increased food security and financial benefits for local communities.
RFS Ethiopia engages 240,000 households as direct beneficiaries of the project across 6 regions and indirectly engages up to 1.4 million people across all 12 regions.
The project aims to meet the following targets:
Institutional frameworks established for enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services within food production systems.
Integrated Landscape Management approaches scaled up.
Knowledge management, learning, and monitoring and assessment processes developed.
At national level, major stakeholders involved in the RFS Ethiopia project include the following ministries: Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; Ministry of Agriculture; and Ministry of Finance and Economic Development.
Other stakeholders directly engaged throughout the project include: community members and resource users and managers at the local level; NGOs; national and international partners and agencies; universities in the 12 targeted areas; local authorities of Oromia, Amhara, Tigray, Afar and Somali Regional States; and the Woreda Agricultural, Water and Energy and Environment Protection and Land Use Offices.
Each RFS country project conducts activities that fall under common thematic areas within the programme. Explore each project theme relevant to the RFS Ethiopia country project below to see which activities are being implemented under each theme.
Stories from the Field
Explore our stories from the field to learn more about the activities, milestones, lessons learned, and achievements of the RFS Ethiopia project.
Relevant Resources
We have a growing library of reports, briefs, case studies, media, tools and guidelines. Explore all resources related to the RFS Ethiopia project to get greater insight into our programme activities.
This IUCN report compiles case studies from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, the Philippines and Viet Nam to highlight how forest landscape restoration (FLR) interventions enhance food security. They illustrate the ‘win-win’ solutions that can enhance land functionality and productivity, develop resilient food systems and explore the long-term potential outputs and enabling conditions for FLR interventions. A greater emphasis on the impacts of degradation and deforestation and other indicators are exemplified throughout these case studies in order to better understand the results from FLR interventions and their relationship to land productivity.
Implemented by UNDP, the objective of the RFS Ethiopia project is to enhance long-term sustainability and resilience of food production systems by addressing the environmental drivers of food insecurity in Ethiopia. The overarching focus is on integrated landscape management (ILM) to achieve food production resilience in landscapes under pressure. This factsheet provides an overview of the project, outlining the various components, stakeholders, and anticipated impacts, as well as key innovative elements within the project design and implementation.
The Knowledge Centre is a central platform for sharing resources and information generated by the 12 Resilient Food Systems country projects and Regional Hub.
Within the Knowledge Centre, you can find helpful resources, tools, case studies, and news stories related to the different countries and themes of the Resilient Food Systems programme.