Call for environment-friendly policies

The Director General of Rwanda Natural Resources Authority (RNRA), Emmanuel Nkurunziza, has called on the central government and development partners to integrate environmental issues while planning for the different sectors of the economy. While addressing a joint sector review on environment and natural resources meeting in Kigali, Nkurunziza said efforts to mainstream and prioritise environmental issues in economic planning of the different sectors is still minimal. “For all sectors we encourage development planning that takes into consideration and prioritises environment and natural resources issues so that such activities don’t have negative consequences on future generations’’“There is still low effort in mainstreaming environment issues in planning stage of development projects.’’He called for greater levels of integration of environment and natural resource issues into other social and productive sectors.“The contribution of environment and natural resources to Rwanda’s development must be understood fully and integrated at all relevant levels to promote sustainable development’’.Joakim Molander, the head of development cooperation in the Embassy of Sweden, observes that Rwanda has done very well in mainstreaming environmental issues in other sectors but there are still some concerns.“Because Rwanda has a high population density, this brings about high pressure on natural resources, causing soil degradation and so on, ’’ he said.Despite that, it was noted that great achievements in the sector of environment and natural resources have been made.“We see great achievements in environment and natural resources as almost all our objectives were achieved’’, Nkurunziza says.He gives an example of the forest sub-sector that has achieved 22.1% of forest cover against the 23.4% target set by the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS). There has been creation of the forest programme implementation task force at national and district levels.The mining sub-sector also has achievements like acquisition of new geophysical data that led to the identification of new mineral potential areas which promoted new investments.The discussed the 2013-2018 strategic plan for the energy sector and natural resources is a follow- up of the previous 2008 – 2012.

National

Call for environment-friendly policies