Efforts focus on conservation and sustainable management of natural resources.

Management of natural resources

Water is a natural resource of prime importance to safeguarding environmental sustainability in the Dominican Republic and throughout the entire island of Hispaniola. It is already evident in the neighbouring country of Haiti that widespread deforestation and soil degradation are having catastrophic effects on that nation’s water supply, affecting drinking water, irrigation and electricity generated from hydropower. Susceptibility to natural disasters is also on the rise. Despite the fact that there is still a relatively large proportion of natural vegetation with a high level of biological diversity in the Dominican Republic, soil degradation and deforestation there pose increasingly serious threats to the water supply nationwide and the livelihoods in particular of rural inhabitants and, often, the poor as a whole.

The Governments of the Dominican Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany have agreed to focus German-Dominican Development Cooperation on efforts to conserve and sustainably utilise natural resources in strategic watersheds of the nation’s highest mountain range, the Cordillera Central, and the areas bordering Haiti. The most important criteria applied in selecting these regions for the programme are their relevance to the national water supply, their ecological value (in the sense of biodiversity and endemism), and their significance for reducing poverty.

German Cooperation will contribute towards achieving the seventh Millennium Development Goal to ensure environmental sustainability as well as to consolidating the German bilateral contribution to rural development. German Development Cooperation (DC) will focus on two issues:

• improvement of institutional capacities for conservation and sustainable management of natural resources, including capacities for cross-border management
• conservation, management and sustainable use of protected areas and watersheds, preferably within the watershed of the Alto Yaque del Norte River and the border region with Haiti.

The importance of this German DC effort has been permanently reinforced by consolidating various instruments in a single programme and strengthening coordination with the activities of other donors, particularly in the border region.

Hut in a rural area of the Dominican Republic