Agriculture, Environment, Natural Resources and Climate Change

The UN in Lesotho seeks to help the people and Government of Lesotho achieve increased and sustainable agricultural growth, food security, access to energy, and resilience to climate change, while also ensuring sustainable usage of natural resources and protecting the environment.

Major accomplishments towards supporting the most vulnerable segments of Lesotho’s population have been achieved. The UN interventions focused primarily on safeguarding the environment and rural livelihoods, emergency response to the El Nino induced drought, and on facilitating the articulation of a national Resilience Framework as well as building capacities of national institutions to increase preparedness and responsiveness to reoccurring emergencies.  At the policy and strategy level the UN has been instrumental in developing a strategy for the Orange River Basin. The strategy adopts a landscape approach to conservation, which recognizes that no meaningful progress will be made in conserving and managing the natural resources throughout the watershed without paying attention to upstream and downstream linkages. In addition, efforts are made to reduce reliance of rural populations on biomass for energy by supporting initiatives that generating clean energy and promote energy saving technologies. The UN family has also been instrumental in helping the Government of Lesotho articulate its emergency response plan. In the area of agriculture, food security and natural resources management the main focus was to help food insecure households meet their immediate food needs and restore the productive potential of the vulnerable farming households

Budget (2013-2018): US$ 63,390,713

Mobilized (2013-2016): US$ 38,018,241

Funding Gap (2017-2018): US$ 25,372,471