Burundi Colline Climate Resilience Project

active

The development objective of the Colline Climate Resilience Project for Burundi is to increase land productivity and climate resilience of fragile communities in targeted collines. The project has four components. The first component, enabling environment for climate resilience, will tackle constraints related to the lack of an integrated policy and coordinated institutional response to land degradation and livelihood resilience. This will be achieved through establishing the enabling environment needed and increasing support for building capacity at national, sub-watershed and colline levels for effective climate risk management, sustainable watershed management, climate resilience, and integrated water resource management. This component has two sub-components. The first subcomponent, strengthening policy and regulatory framework, will provide support to policies and capacity at national and local levels for planning and implementing integrated watershed management and for climate resilient practices benefitting socially vulnerable groups (women and youth). The second subcomponent, institutional capacity strengthening at national, watershed, and community level, will directly support national agencies, and provincial and communal administrations, to implement and manage climate and land risks. The second component, adaptive capacity for sustainable watershed management will address the constraints of fragmented and degraded watersheds and limited access to sustainable finance. It aims to reduce the risks of soil erosion, restore degraded lands and natural resources, and improve the longer-term resilience of the watersheds to climate shocks. It will achieve this through supporting sub-watershed level planning, scaling up landscape restoration, and promoting integrated watershed management (IWM), including management of vulnerable slopes and protected areas. Specifically, project activities will support 87 sub-watersheds targeted by the project, covering 80 collines, and restore 38,639 ha of degraded lands. This component has three subcomponents. The first subcomponent, watershed management planning, will address gaps in coordinated planning of land management interventions. The second subcomponent, sustainable watershed management, will implement the watershed management plans prepared under sub-component 2.1. The third subcomponent, improved management of protected areas (PAs) and reserves, will support the effective and sustainable development of Burundi’s protected area system to conserve biodiversity. The third component, community livelihood resilience support, will address constraints related to limited access to finance and the lack of an integrated response to communities’ needs for resilient livelihoods in the face of rising climate and land risks. This component consists of three sub-components. The first subcomponent, climate-resilience planning, will support the development of Colline-level Climate Action Priorities (or CCAPs). The second subcomponent, climate-resilient agriculture and livelihoods, will support implementation of the CCAPs’ identified priorities and interventions with the aim of enhancing climate-resilient livelihoods and climate-smart agriculture for the most fragile collines. The third subcomponent, land certification, will improve land security through systematic land certification in each target colline, as an enabling condition for land security, access to financing, and climate-resilient livelihood investments. The fourth component, project management, will finance the project management, coordination, communication, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities, as well as the environmental and social framework (ESF).