Project: Mainstreaming Biodiversity into Tourism Development in Jordan

Duration: 5 months, Budget: $52.000
Donor: UNDP
Based on an agreement of cooperation between UNDP and UN-Habitat, UN-Habitat provided technical and management consulting services to assist UNDP in the implementation of phase 1 of the land-use component of the Mainstreaming Biodiversity into Tourism Development Project. The project aims to reduce the impact of tourism on biodiversity in Jordan and it will intervene at three levels.
At the national level it will develop a regulatory and enforcement framework in order to reduce the impact of tourism on biodiversity centrally. Components will be piloted at the local level, assessed and refined before being adopted nationally and made available for replication and up-scaling. At the regional level the project will create public awareness about the sensitivity and value of biodiversity as an asset for tourism in addition to institutional capacity building for planning, monitoring and enforcement of tourism development inside and outside formally protected areas as well as to as to manage its impacts. At the Protected Area (PA) level, the project will work to enhance capacity and manage effectiveness of PAs, including revenue generation, tourism planning and management as well as community relations.

The project has three outcomes:
Outcome 1: Key stakeholders at national, regional and local levels apply an enhanced regulatory and enforcement framework in order to avoid, reduce, mitigate and offset adverse impacts of tourism on biodiversity.
Outcome 2: Institutional capacities for planning, monitoring and enforcement strengthened in the Jerash, Petra and Wadi Rum areas so as to manage the impacts of tourism development on biodiversity within ecologically valuable and sensitive areas.
Outcome 3: Improved management effectiveness particularly in community relations, tourism planning and management as well as revenue generation in the Dibeen, Shoubak and Wadi Rum protected areas.
UN-Habitat has been tasked to implement the land use planning component relating to Outcome 2 of the project specifically. It addresses the implementation and achievement of the following outputs:
Output 2.2: Comprehensive land-use plans based on a Biodiversity Information Management System (BIMS) and covering Jerash Governorate, PDTRA territory, and the Greater Wadi Rum landscapes/ development zones to set development limits so as to protect biodiversity.
Output 2.4: Improved enforcement of land use development constraints geared to protect biodiversity.
UN-Habitat is to provide technical and management consulting services to assist UNDP in the implementation of the planning component of the project, besides building the institutional and technical capacities of the different enforcement agencies required for planning, implementing, monitoring and enforcement so as to manage the impacts of development with emphasis of tourism development inside and outside formally protected areas.
The activity is divided into two distinctive phases. UN-Habitat executed Phase I which is the introductory/preparatory phase that was implemented over a period of around 5 months. Phase II will adopt its results when they are achieved.

Pipeline Project: Zarqa Master Plan

Duration: 18 months, Budget: $1.500.000
Donor: Zarqa Municipality
The municipality of Zarqa approached UN-HABITAT seeking their technical support in preparing a Master Plan for the Zarqa municipality.

The Master Plan will be integrating the city profiling and city Prosperity index approaches to be the base on which the Master Plan can rely on and manage their updating and development.

The Zarqa Municipality has several development projects in the pipeline and opted to prepare a Master Plan for the city prior to implementing the projects so that the work will be integrated with the city priorities and priority action plans and budgets can be allocated accordingly.