Wetlands usually take the brunt of poor land management practices, and those in dry-land countries are under particularly serious pressures from environmental degradation, including biodiversity loss. Wetland management strategies need to be carefully integrated with land use planning and management at catchment- and landscape-levels. Namibia is developing an integrated framework for wetland (including river) health monitoring and analysis based on this premise, as part of its national biodiversity strategy and action plan (NBSAP), Biodiversity and development in Namibia. Key elements of this framework are: State of the environment reporting (SOER) based on catchment-wide biophysical and socio-economic: Use of existing long-term datasets and the emerging permanent sites of the Environmental: Observatories Network of Namibia (EONN): Applicability to a wide variety of arid and semi-arid freshwater and coastal wetlands: Community and specialist monitoring in selected wetland conservancies and other permanent sites; and a focus on indices of biological integrity (IBI). Existing long-term wetland datasets include bird numbers and richness, freshwater fish richness, hydrological flow data, invertebrate richness and standard indices of water quality. The pressure-state-response orientation of SOER in Namibia will be particularly applicable to the context of our wetlands, which although forming less than 5% of the country's surface, are of immense importance for biodiversity and human livelihoods, and are seriously vulnerable to degradation from local and broad scale pressures.