27 October 2014: The Orange-Senqu River Commission (ORASECOM), with the support of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and Global Environment Facility (GEF), adopted the ‘Strategic Action Programme (SAP) for the Orange-Senqu River Basin.’

The SAP provides background information on the basin and SAP development process, identifies priority water-related environmental concerns, outlines the action programme to address the concerns, and outlines implementation of the SAP. As key concerns, the SAP highlights the challenges of: increasing water demand; declining water resource quality; changing hydrological regimes; and increasing land degradation.

The SAP develops objectives to address the challenges, namely: enhance basin-wide understanding of available resources and improve water-use efficiency; improve water resources quality; mitigate adverse effects of the changed hydrological regime, through implementation of a basin-wide environmental flows regime and development of an integrated management plan for the Orange-Senqu River mouth Ramsar site; and reduce the adverse impacts of catchment degradation and improve land use sustainability.

ORASECOM will be seeking funding from a variety of sources for SAP-related projects. Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa are members of ORASECOM, which was founded in 2000. [IWLEARN Press Release] [Publication: Strategic Action Programme (SAP) for the Orange-Senqu River Basin]