Assessment Of The Role Of Integrated Watershed Management And Its Challenges In Case Of Adea Berga District, West Shewa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia

Abstract

Currently, climate change and its impacts is a key issue in worldwide. Adaptation to climate change is making a system suitable to moderate the impact of climate change or deal with the consequence or to take advantage of new opportunities. Integrated watershed management (IWM) gives an opportunity for understanding and reconciling the interconnections among various land use systems. There are various opportunities under integrated watershed management such as getting different benefits, conserving nature and reducing negative impacts together. However, there are challenges arises during implementing the integrated watershed management in different watersheds. The challenges should be clearly identified and forwarding solution should be given for policy and decision makers in order to improve the successes and benefits of watershed management. This study was conducted to assess the role of IWM and its challenges and opportunities of implementation in Haro werke watershed. The sample micro watersheds were purposively selected considering its accessibility and vulnerability to resource degradation. Simple random system was used for interview. Data were collected from all relevant sources through field observation, key informants, interview, focused group discussion, household survey and review of documents. The evidence in the watershed shows that biophysical, socio economic and political factors govern the implementation of integrated watershed management. Large proportion of the watershed area (56.5%) of very steep and steeply slope and degraded land, lack of understanding of IWM awareness and education (53.2%), due to land tenure and topography (45.3%), no habit for maintenance and planning together, and weak institution commitment to transfer watershed principles into practices were the major problems of the watershed. In spite of having those limiting factors, the effort of the government through making policy framework on watershed resource management is a prospect for the area, besides harmonious cultural interaction of the community to live together with nature and themselves. Therefore, policy and strategies should be applied at a watershed level; compressive technical capacity building training should be given to the local experts and information center should be created for sharing data between concerned institutions and stakeholders about the technologies in integrated watershed management practices. The current watershed management approaches mostly focus on physical part of the implementation /soil and water conservation rather than integrating the biological part, but effective watershed management requires multidisciplinary and innovative approaches based on the local situation. Frequent removal of sediments and other maintenance as well as livestock controlling is required.