18 Jun 2020

Minister of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism has encouraged Batswana to practise  good land stewardship to curb desertification.

Ms Philda Kereng said this in her Desertification and Drought Day commemoration message on June 17.

Ms Kereng said good land stewardship was necessary for securing health and productivity of land.

Batswana should mitigate drought effects and make people and ecosystems more resilient to climate change, she said.

Minister Kereng said prevention of land degradation was achievable through avoiding over-exploitation of natural resources, indiscriminate cutting of live trees, veldt fires, over-stocking and practising sustainable harvesting of veldt products and land use as well as planting of trees.

Commemorated under the theme; ‘Food. Feed. Fibre’ the day was meant to raise awareness on changing public attitudes as leading drivers of desertification and land degradation.

“As a country, we acknowledge that desertification and drought are problems of global dimension affecting all regions of the world,” she said.

In that regard, there was need for joint action by the international community to combat desertification and drought.

Botswana ratified the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in 1997, and since acceding to the agreement, efforts had been made to implement it.

Currently, a National Action Programme (NAP) had been developed to ensure that people participated in anti-desertification programmes.

The UNCCD is the sole legally binding international agreement on land issues with the overall objective of combating desertification as well as to mitigate effects in countries experiencing serious drought and/or desertification. ENDS