Zambia

Housing may be the Third World's most intractable problem, but mud, adobe, earth-bricks, soil-cement and other traditional building materials are cheap, readily available and can be made and used by the poor people themselves to build their own homes. Today, mud perhaps offers the only practical prospect for building the millions of houses which will be needed over the next twenty years. 

Natural resource governance is central to the outcomes of biodiversity conservation efforts and to patterns of economic development, particularly in resource-dependent rural communities. This volume examines the political dynamics of natural resource governance processes through a range of comparative case studies across east and southern Africa.

This book describes how the four-year GEF-funded project “Removing Barriers to Invasive Plant Management in Africa” was instrumental in developing ways of limiting the severe ecological, social and economic impacts in different parts of Africa of a number of particularly devastating alien plant invaders.

Agricultural investments involving the acquisition of long-term rights over large areas of land in developing countries have been the focus of much debate in recent years. Many have welcomed the renewed momentum for private investment in agriculture, but trends towards large-scale land acquisitions raise major social, economic and environmental concerns. While calls for more inclusive investment models have multiplied, there is limited understanding of what works and under what conditions.

This document discusses the need to balance short-term water productivity gains – in particular in agriculture - with the long-term role that water flows provide for maintaining sustainable landscape ecosystem services (ESS), and serving multiple benefits to human well-being. The document provides a summary of concepts around the nexus of water productivity, water flows in landscapes and ecosystem services.