Book excerpt: The Zambezi Environment Outlook is the integrated assessment of the state and trends of the key environmental resources, including freshwater, land, biodiversity and forests. It covers cross-sectional elements relating human settlement, agriculture, energy, tourism, industry, climate change and variability. The report provides a current update and introduces new and emerging issues, following the widely acknowledged State of the Environment Zambezi Basin2000, which was the first environmental assessment of a single ecosystem I southern Africa