Connecting poverty & ecosystem services : Focus on Mauritania

Division of Policy Development and Law (DPDL) The objective of DPDL, a division within UNEP, is to enable members of the international community to develop integrated and coherent policy responses to environmental problems and to strengthen environmental law as well as to improve com- pliance with and enforcement of legal instruments. [...] All of the papers are available online at 1 The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was a four-year study requested by the United Nations Secretary General in 2001 to pro- vide an overview of the state of the global ecosystems and the consequences of ecosystem changes on human well-being. [...] Mauritania is a very dry country at the western South of the Sahara and Sahel, the country is drained extreme of the Sahara desert, bordering the Atlantic by the Senegal River, creating a river valley suitable Ocean. [...] Sparsely populated in northern by precipitation, which decreases with the latitude, regions, the people of Mauritania are concentrated in namely the Sahara zone, the Sahel zone, and the the south near water sources; they are primarily of Sudano-Sahelian zone, bordering the Senegal River Arab-Berber descent, unified “through the use of var- (FAO/SMIAR 2001). [...] The almost 90 per cent of the population was nomadic Senegal River opens into a delta floodplain at the and rural but, due to frequent droughts and govern- extreme southeast of the country where it flows into ment policies, much of the population has migrated the Atlantic Ocean.