Strategic Plan for the Environment and Natural Resources Sector 2018-2024.

The Strategic Plan for the Environment and Natural Resources Sector is a national cross sectoral plan of Rwanda for the period 2018-2024. Its mission is to promote, coordinate and enable the sustainable management of Rwanda’s natural resources to safeguard green & climate resilient growth and achieve high standards of living across generations. To this end, it sets out measures concerning the optimal management of natural capital (land, water, forests, environment); the full access to high quality, renewable, sufficient & affordable water and energy resources; the phase out of charcoal/wood as primary energy sources; the climate resilience across productive sectors, namely agriculture and energy; the healthy and environmentally friendly surroundings, with low pollution and high biodiversity and ecotourism, for national and international benefit; the use the national climate finance momentum for resource mobilization to finance cross sector priorities in order to achieve robust climate and environment results.
With the overall Objective to optimize and scale-up sustainable and climate resilient management of natural capital resources to anchor and accelerate achievement of Rwandan prosperity, the Plan sets up 7 Specific Objectives: 1. Establish and enforce national quality standards for sustainable forest management (SFM) & agroforestry materials and management techniques to improve productivity, optimally maintaining forest cover at 30% and doubling land under agroforestry resulting in higher-quality, more suitable and sustainable sources of biomass and non-wood forest products. 2. Optimize and scale-up Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) using a catchment-based coordination and planning approach for equitable, productive and sustainable use, strengthening governance and equitable allocation frameworks for productive use of high-quality water resources, addressing issues of water balance/scarcity, storage, quality, and water use efficiency 3. Identify innovative solutions to systemic and crosscutting issues of quality standards of management, linkages to national priorities for job creation, investment and urbanization as well as improving policy and institutional coherence, multi-stakeholder partnerships and coordination, as well as data, monitoring and accountability. 4. Quality weather and climate information and services, upgrading observation networks and capacity to deliver real-time access to certified, high-quality weather and climate services for extreme events and user decision making needs. 5. Safeguard environmental resources through strengthened regulatory, monitoring and compliance systems for pollution control including hazardous/toxic wastes, rehabilitation of degraded wetland ecosystems, implementation of Rwanda’s NDCs for climate change along with E/CC mainstreaming and capacity building activities. 6. Catalyse the responsible development and improved performance of the mining, petroleum and gas sector by de-risking private sector investment through exploration, modernization of techniques, consolidation of small concessions into District mining blocks meeting national quality standards (‘model mine’), and emphasis on value addition and sustainable practices. 7. Develop a holistic and integrated land management system to optimize productivity, building on successes in land administration/registration and improve established land use plans and systems; ensuring integrated sectoral, District and national-level management that is participatory, reliable and sustainable. Sustainable and climate resilient natural capital underwrites Rwanda’s present and future prosperity. This underscores the value addition of the ENR sector to the medium-term goals of National Strategy for Transformation (NST 1), 2017 – 2024 and longer-term goals of Vision 2050. Moreover, a high-income economy with high-quality of life and standards of living inturn requires access to high-quality natural capital resources and services.
Implementation of the Strategic Plan and of the National Strategy for Transformation (NST-1 2018-2024) will follow a sequence of priority interventions, recommended to be addressed prior ‘scaled-up’ interventions: the rationale for this sequencing is that the majority of ENR sub-sectors have fundamental quality management optimizations that need to be addressed before investment in expanded activities is made. This is to ensure efficient, effective and sustainable management of natural capital as a foundation for growth and prosperity. The Ministry of Environment (MoE) will lead implementation of overall ENR Sector Strategic Plan, and cross-cutting priority interventions.
As a support tool for implementing the Plan and the NST 1 priorities, a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) logical framework was developed through a highly participatory approach. The ongoing Result Based Management (RBM) Project will continue to update and improve the existing M&E system with the goal to have a computerised M&E system linking all ENR sub-sectors including the Districts in data collection, treatment, report and evaluation. The system has 165 indicators and metadata for reporting.