Windhoek — THE Gobabeb Training and Research Centre (GTRC) plans to establish an ecological restoration unit.

This was announced by a junior researcher at Gobabeb, Taimi Kapalanga, during a presentation in Windhoek earlier this month.

The idea behind the unit is that land is an asset and it should be preserved or restored to increase its health and productivity, said Kapalanga.

She said the planned restoration unit would be a networking hub that would develop research approaches and offer training.

Ecological restoration should be applied to degraded land, such as former mining areas and unproductive farmland, she said.

Kapalanga and her colleague at Gobabeb, Emily Mutota, have been sent to Iceland to do a six-month course on land restoration at the Agricultural University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

The Gobabeb centre is a joint venture between the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia (DRFN).