There are few options for ensuring food security in Eritrea other than through intensifying agriculture and increasing productivity at the household and farm level. To sustain such levels of agricultural intensification, it is important to maintain and restore local ecosystems, allowing them to continue to provide the ecosystem goods and services necessary to keep land arable and ensure pastoral production remains viable for farmers. The GEF alternative will therefore address sustainable natural resource management issues that would remain largely unaddressed within the baseline scenario. A range of constraints limit the adoption of sustainable natural resource use, land management, forest-use strategies and other practices that yield local-level benefits. Some of these barriers also impede the generation of global benefits, such as those related to conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems and the landscape's ability to sequester carbon. To address these barriers, the project will demonstrate how agricultural development, landscape and ecosystem restoration/rehabilitation and sustainable forest management can be simultaneously achieved with tangible benefits for both the environment and local communities.The project will therefore adopt an approach that seeks to address these barriers and challenges, by adopting a combination of specific technical approaches and interventions at national and local levels, including at farm levels. The solutions advanced by the project strategy are expected to contribute to overcoming some of these barriers and challenges and facilitate the creation of an enabling environment that empowers government institutions, local authorities and land users, including farmers, to adopt and take up sustainable land use practices at the different levels of land and resource use and management.