The priority agenda: Keep learning how to best manage interlinkages at the operational level, through integrated project approaches. To derive local and global environmental benefits, promote sustainable development, and meet human needs.

1. INTEGRATED APPROACHES ACROSS
GEF FOCAL AREAS.
A DOMINICAN REPUBLIC CASE:
DEMONSTRATING SUSTAINABLE
LAND MANAGEMENT IN THE UPPER
SABANA YEGUA WATERSHED
LD/OP 15 UNDP/GEF/SUR FUTURO
PROJECT.
Domingo Marte

3. SABANA YEGUA WATERSHED
• A territory of 166,000 hectares.
Consists of the catchments of three
rivers (Yaque del Sur, Grande del
Medio and Las Cuevas). 48% of the
territory is occupied by two protected
areas, seriously threaten.

5. TOPOGRAPHY
• Mountainous, ranging from 400 to
1640 m.a.s.l. A wide diversity of
climatic conditions, ranging from
725 mm to 2,000 mm of annual
rainfall.

7. MICRO-BIOCLIMATIC REGIONS
• The extreme altitude gradient
and rugged topography give rise
to a complicated mosaic of 8
distinct micro-bioclimatic regions
ranging from Subtropical Dry
Forest to Montane Wet Forest.

10. Social Issues
• 77,000 persons, living in around 100 villages
• 80-100% of households in the communities living in
poverty.
• No electric service in the majority of the communities.
• Most households do not have access to clean water,
water sanitation services or solid waste collection,
placing them at risk from water-borne diseases.

11. Social Issues(cont.)
• Farmers are heavily dependent on
precarious subsistence agriculture,
with limited access to markets,
opportunities for employment and
sources of alternative income.
• Almost all of the area outside of
protected area system is deforested,
being dedicated to agriculture and
grazing activities.

12. ENVIRONMENTAL AND
SOCIOECONOMIC VALUES OF THE
WATERSHED
• Provides irrigation, electricity and potable
water to more than 600,000 persons
downstream.
• Carbon storage, biodiversity reservoir,
production of water, climate balance, and
others.

13. INTERLINKAGES: A new push for
discussions.
• Linkages between human activities and
environmental themes has been
discussed and documented for a long
time.
• STAP report about interlinkages
– Pertinent questions to project designers to
ensure interlinkages are addressed.
– Screen project activities for positive or
negative interactions with other focal areas.

14. The priority agenda
• Keep learning how to best manage
interlinkages at the operational level,
through integrated project approaches.
To derive local and global environmental
benefits, promote sustainable
development, and meet human needs.

15. SY PROJECT DESIGN
INTERLINKAGES BECAME
EVIDENT
• Problem tree
• Threat Analysis (threat, root causes and
barriers)
• Logical framework
• Need to invest quality time and effort.

16. Interlinkages identified right at the
start .
• Main Problem: Degradation of soil and
vegetation resources in the Upper Sabana
Yegua Watershed System leads to
increased vulnerability to environmental
shocks, decreased agricultural production,
reduction in access to basic services
(water and electricity), demographic
instability, loss of carbon reserves and loss
of ecosystem resilience”.

17. Main Threats
• i) Conversion of forest and shade coffee
to other land uses, which has left 70% of
non-protected areas without tree cover;
• ii) Application of inappropriate land use
and damaging agriculture and grazing
practices on steep lands (e.g burning,
hillside tillage, and reduced fallow).

18. Main root causes
• i) Farmers with limited access to financial capital
tend to favour land management options to look
for short term returns for a minimum of
investment, and risks.
• ii) In most cases they have limited knowledge of
production technologies.
• iii)The potential to generate and apply
alternative technologies is constrained by the
limited understanding of farmers and the
institutions (both governmental and NGOs)
which support them.

19. Main barriers
• Insuficient and inadequately developed
and applied policies, limited institutional
capacity, limited human and social capital
at local level, lack of access to adequate
and appropriate finance and incentives,

20. Goal and Objectives
• Project Goal: “Promotion of sustainable
development of the human and natural
resources of the Upper Sabana Yegua
Watershed System”.
• Project Objective: “To promote the sustainable
land management in the Upper Sabana Yegua
Watershed System, in order to achieve global
environmental benefits within the context of
sustainable development and poverty reduction”.

21. 3. Relationship to GEF
operational areas and focus.
Designers alignment.
• Alignment of design team: Crucial step to
educating the team to reach conclusions about
the interlinkages.
• Consensus was easily reached about project
activities to reverse the effects of land
degradation in order to maintain and enhance
ecosystem integrity, stability, functions and
services, thus qualifying under the GEF OP #15
.

22. SY Design Team Alignment
• Agreement to prefer native species for
reforestation; use of multi-species planting;
preference of IPM. Envisioned local and global
benefits : improve water quantity and quality,
flood reduction, improve biodiversity(through the
promotion of a biodiversity-friendly landscape
and the reduction of pressures on protected
areas); climate change (through the promotion
of carbon storage by increasing perennial
component in the landscape) and international
waters (through reductions in the sediment load
entering the Caribbean Sea).

23. Environmental actions and poverty
• Operational linkages between environmental
actions and poverty were difficult to translate into
activities, due to insufficient understanding of
what poverty really meant under the context of
these type of projects, fear to cross the
boundaries of OP#15 to the GEF operational
area #12, and potential funding constraints from
GEF for social activities. Later, poverty
alleviation activities were designed through
better access and quality improvement of
education, health, energy, housing, potable
water and income generating activities, linked to
environmental services rendered by the
population. The GODR agreed to co-finance the
social activities.

24. Ensuring interlinkages across
the implementation process.
• Interlinkages thought out at the project design
phase will greatly increase the possibility of
ground synergies within environmental issues
and these, with social factors. But in long-term
and multidisciplinary projects, some kind of
participatory planning and coordinating
structure, coupled with appropriate methods and
processes to obtain integrated planning, may be
needed to keep and enhance interlinkages
during implementation.

25. A PLANNING & COORDINATION
FRAMEWORK FOR SY.
• Division of the watershed into 8 administrative
zones
• Establishment of a participatory structure
comprised of a community development
committee, a zone development committee, a
watershed committee and a steering committee
at the ministerial level. Sur Futuro Foundation
as an equidistant private organization, will bring
together different government and non-government
institutions.

26. A planning & coordination(cont)
• Placement of a zone coordinator ( will be
the first to be trained in integrated
approaches) on each zone.
• Continuous training of key personnel to
work under the integrated approach.
Emphasis will be put into the learning by
doing.

27. A planning & coordination(cont.)
• Preparation of an annual participatory zone
development plan to center project activities
and carry out the necessary synergies with
other focal areas or non-project activities. Not
doubt, this will be the most important product
to obtain, which will be progressively improved
as personnel gain more experience and the M
& E retrofeed the planning process and
content. Collection of disaggregated statistics
will be enhanced.
M & E will rely heavily on the structure and
process outlined before. Lessons harvested
will serve to establish linkages with other
national and international projects.

28. FINAL REMARKS
• Interlinkages and integrated approaches should
be an entry way to GEF projects, as well as a
work culture to be instilled in project designers
and implementers.
• The set of questions proposed by the STAP
report to examine interlinkages, are quite
pertinent in designing a GEF project.
• The alignment of the project design team is a
crucial step toward interlinkages.
• An early identification of the problem tree, the
careful development of a threats analysis and
logical framework should move project
designers to address interlinkages through
proper activities.

29. FINAL REMARKS
• In long-term complex projects, the need for
some kind of participatory planning process
aimed to yield an integrated plan is a requisite
to maintain and enhance interlinkages through
implementation.
• Interlinkages are a fact of life. The GEF focal
areas have been designed to facilitate
specialization and administration on those
areas, but in the ideal and silent undisturbed
world, the living organisms and the functional
process keep their synergies, without the
knowledge of the compartmentalization.
Perhaps in most of the focal areas we should
strive for a common core of interlinkages
assessments and operational mechanisms.

30. FINAL REMARKS
• Many projects have failed or come short of
fulfilling their objectives as a result of the lack of
integrated approaches. The search for
integrated approaches (mainly in rural
development projects which were heavily funded
three decades ago) were at one time abandoned
due to their institutional difficulties. Now that we
are talking about Human Development,
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Framework
and other complex proposals, those approaches
are needed more than ever.

31. THANK YOU.