Namibia PDNA 2009 - GFDRR

Annex 10
Environment
Introduction
Natural disasters are by definition environmental events, and
it is therefore difficult to precisely define what should and
should not be included under the environment sector in a
PDNA. For the damage and loss assessment, the environment
sector essentially includes impacts on natural assets, including
protected areas, and environmental clean-up costs, where these
do not already fit readily into other sectors. Hence, impacts
to production forests and fish stocks in commercial fisheries
are covered under agriculture and fisheries. However, impacts
to natural resources which do not have established markets
or are not subject to extractive use often fall between the
cracks and may be incorporated into the environment sector.
Impacts on water supplies and environmental health issues are
usually covered by the water and sanitation and health sectors,
but broader issues of water pollution and widespread debris
disposal may fall under the environment. The interconnection
of environment with the impacts assessed under various
sectors means that:
• Coordination with other sectors is very important
to ensure that impacts are neither double-counted
nor overlooked.
• The environment sector tends to include the
impacts that are hard to evaluate because
established markets do not exist.
• Since many impacts on environmental assets are
assessed under other sectors and those remaining
are difficult to quantify, the damages and losses
presented under the environment sector typically
under-represent the real magnitude of the
environmental impact of a disaster.
Economic sectors based on natural resources—notably mining,
fisheries and agriculture, and tourism—directly contribute
roughly 20 percent of Namibia’s GDP, based on national
accounts. This however, underestimates the broader economic
contribution of the environment, especially in the case of tourism,
which is overwhelmingly nature-based. The establishment of a
Tourism Satellite Account has demonstrated that tourism
directly provides around 4 percent of GDP, and including
indirect contributions accounts for around 14 percent. This is
considerably more than the 1.6 percent of GDP contributed by
hotels and restaurants sector in the standard national accounts,
which is typically used as the proxy for tourism.
The importance of the natural environment is therefore wellrecognized
and Namibia has an extensive protected areas
system, which alone contributes an estimated 3-6 percent
of GDP. The Namibia Vision 2030 states succinctly that, “Our
environment is clean, and we will continue to keep it clean.”
The need to extract and safeguard economic benefits from
environmental resources is also recognized, especially for
the poor. Community-Based Natural Resource Management
(CBNRM) is mentioned prominently in the Vision, and has
been a major programme within the Ministry of Environment
and Tourism in recent years. This has developed an extensive
system of communal conservancies; communal lands that are
managed by legally mandated community organizations for
tourism income and to regulate local resource use (see figure
below).
Figure 40: Registered communal
conservancies in Namibia
As well as the enumeration of damages and losses under the
environment sector, it is therefore also necessary to provide
a broader narrative of the role of environment in the disaster,
including environmental impacts covered by other sectors,
environmental factors that may have contributed to vulnerability
to the extreme event in question, and environmental impact
mitigation during reconstruction.
Pre-disaster Situation
With its low population density and large expanses of arid or
semi-arid land poorly suited to intensive agriculture, Namibia’s
natural environment is generally in a very good condition. The
population of wild game animals in the country is equivalent to
the human population, approximately two million.
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