The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is carrying out a post conflict environmental assessment in Rwanda fourteen years after the Genocide of Tutsis. 

Officiating at a consultative workshop that ended yesterday at hotel Novotel, the UNEP-post conflict and disaster management Rwanda Project Coordinator, Hassan Partow, said the workshop aimed at  providing a portrait of the overall environment in post conflict Rwanda.

"Rwanda Environment Management Authority(REMA) provided scientists who carried out desk studies from which a team of experts from UNEP will pick key environment drivers facing the country that can have impact on the country’s long term development programmes,” Partow said. 

He noted that the UNEP had come in late because that is when the Rwandan government called for an environmental assessment. 

"UNEP does not initiate environmental assessment in any country, it only comes in when invited by the government of a given country,” explained Partow noting that the Rwandan government called for UNEP’s environmental assessment in 2006.    

In his remarks, the United Nations Development Programme country director Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah noted that the country had made remarkable environment development in accordance to the Millennium development goals.

Meanwhile REMA’s director of environment impact assessment and enforcement Theobald Mashinga who opened the workshop on behalf of the State Minister for Mineral resources, noted that the government had been looking forward for the environmental assessment report for long time.

"We hope its findings will be our environmental conservation baseline,” Mashinga said. 

He added that the research will also look into the needed capacity for various local institutions engaged in the country’s ecosystem rehabilitation.

In an exclusive interview with The New Times, Frank Turyatunga, the Africa representative at the Global Resource Information and Database (GRID-Arendal), a UNEP funded programme based in Norway, said environmental assessment was important not only to Rwanda but to the whole region especially because of the shared natural resources.

"An assessment is important because it studies the evolvement of ecosystem in natural resources like rivers, lakes, forests and swamps most of which are shared by different countries,” Turyatunga said. 

Several presentations at the meeting on Rwanda’s ecosystem indicated that there have been considerable efforts after 1994 to encourage restoration of the lost greenbelt.

The environmental assessment research is to be carried out by a team of fourteen UNEP environmental experts who are in the country for a ten-day field study of the highlighted damaged environment.

The study is expected to end in December this year while a complete report will be presented by March 2009

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