The Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Environment, Mr. Ibrahim Idris has charged implementing Ministries, Department and Agencies of the Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes (ACReSAL) to ensure proper supervision and monitoring of projects to achieve delivery of their mandate to the project.

Idris, who is also the Chairman, Federal Technical Committee of the ACRESAL Project, gave the charge on Friday at the presentation of operational vehicles to some of the lead implementing MDAs on the ACReSAL Project.

The presentation of the vehicles is to enable the project realize it’s cardinal components of increasing landscapes restoration and enhance livelihoods in the participating states.

According to the Permanent Secretary, “Even at personal level, if you invest your money, and do not supervise what is happening. You will lose. So you must move around to see what is happening. Where you have problems, you address these problems.

In his welcome address, Mr. Umar Abdulhamid, the National Project Coordinator disclosed that ACReSAl has an investment portfolio of 700 million US dollars to intervene and address issues surrounding landscapes degradation arising from desertification, deforestation that has been brought about by climate change, challenges, natural causes and human activities.

He said the impact has been enormous “The project is a six -year lifespan project that just started a year ago. Our team has started actual implementation. Restoration of landscapes have started immensely. At the last count, we have actually been able to restore over 2,000 degraded landscapes.

“We have over 96,529 beneficiaries directly and the list is ongoing. Our expectation is that by mid-term review, we would have been able to deliver more than 60% of the goals and achievements at the land and ecosystem restoration level and the beneficiaries in total.

Some of the recipients of the operational vehicles are representatives from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Federal Ministry of Water Resources and Sanitation, Nigeria Integrated Water Resources Management Commission, department of Climate Change- Federal Ministry of Environment, others are department of Forestry -Federal Ministry of Environment, National Space Research and Development Agency, department of Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought Management among others.