A monitoring and reporting platform aimed at strengthening Namibia's capacity to monitor, coordinate, and report on its commitments under key multilateral environmental agreements was launched in Windhoek today.
The platform aims to provide reliable, accessible, and credible data needed for effective environmental governance.
The Multilateral Environmental Agreements Monitoring and Reporting Online Platform is a digital system developed to help Namibia collect, manage, track, and report environmental data required under international environmental conventions.
The platform is designed to bring together environmental information that is often disseminated across different institutions and reporting systems differently.
UNDP Resident Representative, Amanda Serumaga, explained.
“By bringing environmental information into a more coordinated national system, it will help institutions track progress, identify implementation gaps, and highlight areas requiring additional policy attention, institutional capacity, or investment. Equally important, it will reduce duplication, improve consistency across reporting processes, and preserve valuable institutional knowledge between reporting cycles.”
Minister of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism Indileni Daniel explained.
“Data must be shared on time, research must respond to national needs, and environmental commitments must be included in annual work plans and budgets.”
The platform cuts across three multilateral environmental agreements: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
Associate Dean of School of the Agriculture and Fisheries Sciences at the University of Namibia (UNAM) Prof. Simon Angombe also weighs in.
“The idea is to have a fully functional online tracking system platform. That is the ultimate goal. Of course, we first need to assess our capabilities and identify the priority indicators. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has around 227 indicators, and it is not feasible to implement all of them at once. The project also did not specify how many indicators had to be included; it simply required us to create a platform.”