Namibia National De-bushing Programme — Bush Encroachment Control for Water & Rangeland Restoration

Bush encroachment by invasive thornbush species (mainly Senegalia mellifera) now affects up to 45 million hectares of Namibian farmland across 9 of the country's 14 regions — more than half the country's land area — cutting livestock carrying capacity by up to two-thirds and suppressing groundwater recharge, since a single 2.5-metre bush can draw over 60 litres of water a day through evapotranspiration.

Namibia's Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism and the German development agency GIZ ran the 'Support to De-bushing' programme from 2014-2017 (EUR 4 million, funded by Germany's BMZ), building the technical and market infrastructure — later institutionalised as the Namibia Biomass Industry Group (N-BiG) and the De-bushing Advisory Service — needed to turn encroacher bush into a harvestable resource rather than a rangeland liability.

Concrete offtake has followed: Ohorongo Cement now covers roughly 30% of its kiln energy needs with encroacher wood chips (about 80,000 tonnes/year), and NamPower broke ground in November 2024 on the 40MW Otjikoto Biomass Power Station, expected to commission around 2027. By 2022 roughly 1.6 million hectares of encroached land had been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council for sustainable harvesting.

Scale remains the honest caveat: national clearing runs at an estimated 200,000 hectares a year — about 0.5% of the encroached area — against a University of Namibia/Oxford Forestry study confirming restoration thinning measurably reduces encroachment density on treated farmland, and an Economics of Land Degradation Initiative assessment estimating N$48 billion in benefits against N$28.1 billion in costs over 25 years if de-bushing were scaled nationally.