Natural Resources Management
Natural Resources Management (NRM) can be seen as an evolution of rural development. It pays more attention to the intergenerational and governance aspects of rural development, linking government sponsorship and support to stakeholder action.
There are several important factors to effective NRM and these relate to scale;
There are several important factors to effective NRM and these relate to scale;
- to operate at the level of government where the community, including women and relevant stakeholders can identify with the specific landscape as so be more likely to take action and appreciate the results, this is usually the regional scale just above local government.
- to ‘visualise’ the landscape in ways that the community can relate to, usually their livelihoods, so that plans addressing the intergenerational aspects of NRM are more likely to be accepted and acted on; some call this ‘a triple bottom line’ approach or building resilience.
- to address the human capacity to act in the region; this includes human skills, gender equity, the enabling regulatory environment and resources in terms of capital and infrastructure. This is sometimes expressed in terms of five forms of capital necessary for community well being; financial, physical, human, social and knowledge.
- to plan actions around ecological units where NRM action can be expected to have somewhat similar results; this provides a logical basis for monitoring and so adaptive management, there are likely to be many such units in a typical region. That is, it is important to define the key NRM issues in a region before deciding on the units to monitor.
NRM resembles river basin commission management and is often organized around natural hydrological units such as catchments, as water movement is fundamental to many landscape processes. In an era of climate change concern, and particularly in flatter areas, the natural unit around which NRM is organised is sometimes bio regions (Australia is divided into 85 bio regions). This enables monitoring of changes in bio diversity and land use over time due to human and climate impacts.
IID has been involved in NRM planning and monitoring in Australia for state governments of NSW and SA; in South East Asia for the Mekong River Commission, for ADB-GEF, in Central Asia and UNDP-GEF in Azerbaijan and Vietnam. IID is a member of the GEF forum for the Pacific.
Planning for NRM can have several approaches, a common feature is the need for the key regional stakeholders to agree on a future medium term ‘vision’ to use in dealing with possible investors such as Government, key industry partners and development banks. Some NRM planning takes a risk science based approach in which the key regional NRM and other ‘assets’ such as heritage are identified along with the ‘hazards’ they may be threatened with and their degree of vulnerability to these. This is to prioritise actions to reduce vulnerability to the identified hazards.
IID has used this approach to analysis the remaining post recovery needs in the Ayeyarwady delta in Myanmar following the international and national investments to address the damage from TC Nargis that struck in 2008 with a human loss of some 140,000 people and a subsequent collapse of the fisheries ecosystem.
IID has been involved in NRM planning and monitoring in Australia for state governments of NSW and SA; in South East Asia for the Mekong River Commission, for ADB-GEF, in Central Asia and UNDP-GEF in Azerbaijan and Vietnam. IID is a member of the GEF forum for the Pacific.
Planning for NRM can have several approaches, a common feature is the need for the key regional stakeholders to agree on a future medium term ‘vision’ to use in dealing with possible investors such as Government, key industry partners and development banks. Some NRM planning takes a risk science based approach in which the key regional NRM and other ‘assets’ such as heritage are identified along with the ‘hazards’ they may be threatened with and their degree of vulnerability to these. This is to prioritise actions to reduce vulnerability to the identified hazards.
IID has used this approach to analysis the remaining post recovery needs in the Ayeyarwady delta in Myanmar following the international and national investments to address the damage from TC Nargis that struck in 2008 with a human loss of some 140,000 people and a subsequent collapse of the fisheries ecosystem.