Federal Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks will fund the conservation of eco-systems in the Nile basin with six million euros from the Ministry's International Climate Initiative over the next four years. The funds will be used to support ripar-ian countries in the sustainable management of important transboundary wetlands and to promote the use of ecosystem services.
The river Nile and its tributaries cover approximately one tenth of the surface area of Africa and are thus by far the most important freshwater source in the region. Just under 25 percent of the African population lives in the eleven riparian countries. In 1999 the riparian states Egypt, Ethiopia, Burundi, Kenya, the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda launched the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) to provide a common framework for the development and management of the river's water resources. Germany has been supporting the initiative from its beginning and is also giving advice to the NBI Secretariat.
To date the initiative concentrated on implementing large-scale hydropower and irrigation in-frastructure projects. Measures to secure ecosystem services of, for instance, wetlands, have not yet been taken. However, the wetlands along the Nile basin are of outstanding socio-economic and ecological importance. They are needed for large animal migrations in South Sudan, for example, and they serve as habitat for endangered species such as the shoebill, a unique pelican-resembling wader.
At the same time wetlands regulate water levels in the river as well as water quality (regional ecosystem service). Moreover, they secure a large part of the population's livelihood by providing food, building materials and income from tourism (local ecosystem services). How-ever, many of these partly transboundary wetlands are under threat due to increasing drain-age and land-use changes converting them in particular to arable land.
For this reason, in 2013 the NBI member states adopted the NBI Wetland Management Strat-egy and the NBI Strategic Action Programme 2013 to 2017 to carry out more joint measures to improve wetland conservation.