Restoring the Future of Tradition
Returning to the land
Khatmah found work in a textile factory in the city. But after returning home to care for her ailing mother, she saw an opportunity to help restore the family’s traditional livelihood as a member of the village’s hima association, as part of a project aimed at reviving traditional institutions to achieve sustainable rangeland management.
Having gained rights over a 100-ha plot of degraded state-held land, the association set rules outlining access to the hima that would allow the rangeland to regenerate.
Meanwhile, practical training helped the villagers to develop systems to manage use of the hima—from access to grazing, seeding, harvesting and patrolling.
As a woman, Khatmah was used to being sidelined in community meetings, but she soon became a leading voice in decision-making around the hima and its management.
“Now they listen to me,” she smiles. “They accept my ideas and come to help when I say the hima needs to be protected against illegal grazing.”
Sustainable management, shared benefits
The association decided that pastoralists would only graze livestock in the autumn, while Khatmah and other women would harvest medicinal herbs from the rangeland in the spring.
After two years, the hima had started to regenerate and the increased availability of pasture enabled herders to save money by buying less fodder.
Khatmah and other women in the community were taught how to process medicinal herbs into teabags, providing a much-needed income boost and proving the potential for generating new revenue streams from the land.
The success of the project has shown how traditional sustainable rangeland management systems can help communities understand threats to their land, and to work together to manage land use to tackle degradation and desertification head on—enabling damaged ecosystems to recover alongside local livelihoods.
Now, Khatmah dreams of seeing the hima system expanded across the rest of her local rangeland.
“After two years, the soil has become moist and regained life. Everything is bigger, better, fresher and smells better,” Khatmah says. “If the rangeland is healthy, it will be booming for the local people and we can really benefit. I want to see other villages doing the same.”
The Healthy Ecosystems for Rangeland Development project (HERD) is a four-year, Global Environment Facility-funded initiative bringing international experience and scientific expertise in ecosystem restoration to efforts to scale up proven approaches such as hima across half a million hectares in Jordan and Egypt.
Led by the UN Environment Programme in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature and national partners, HERD is supporting communities to create inclusive rangeland management plans, while developing institutional capacity to ensure that these plans are integrated into policy and backed by wider legislation.
HERD is just one of more than 80 projects the UN Environment Programme has implemented with the backing of the Global Environment Facility in support of the UN Convention to Combat Degradation and Desertification and other efforts to bring a halt to the threat of land degradation globally.
Focusing on the theme “Restore Land to Sustain Life”, the 14th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Degradation and Desertification is taking place in Delhi, India from 2 to 14 September 2019.
*SOURCE: UN Environment. Go to ORIGINAL. 2019 Human Wrongs Watch
