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Month: November 2017

What is the Landscape Approach?

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Integrated landscape approaches are regularly touted as a potential means to reconcile local socio-economic and global environmental challenges. The landscape represents an ideal scale at which to implement strategies and evaluate progress of initiatives designed towards more sustainable outcomes for both people and nature. As such, landscape approaches are increasingly acknowledged within global environmental policy discourse and have generated discussion and debate within the scientific and practitioner communities.

However, despite this momentum, there remains a lack of consensus on: how to define a landscape approach; how to best apply the approach in practice; and what is the appropriate spatial scale for implementation and analysis.

The Global Landscapes Forum has recognized these challenges since its inauguration and continues to stimulate the dialogue to enhance the discourse and ultimately generate meaningful solutions at the landscape scale. In anticipation of the forthcoming GLF Bonn, this digital summit presents a timely opportunity for a select group of experts and the broader GLF community to engage in a discussion that will directly address the pressing issues of definition, implementation and scale of landscape approaches.

 

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Forest tenure reform implementation in Uganda: What lessons for policy and practice?

Purpose:

Over the past decade or more land and forest tenure reforms in Africa, Asia and Latin America have provided greater legal recognition of local, customary, indigenous territorial rights and women’s rights. However, implementation of these reforms has been uneven and has led to mixed results, including increasing tenure insecurity.

In order to better understand reform implementation and to generate insights for policy and practice, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) together with partners in Uganda, Indonesia and Peru initiated a research and action project in 2014 intended to:

  1. Establish how forest tenure reforms emerge, and document experiences and options for formal approaches to securing tenure rights for forest adjacent communities.
  2. Identify impacts of tenure reform on rights and access of women, poor men and ethnic minorities to forests and trees
  3. Identify factors that constrain support for reform and its implementation
  4. Disseminate lessons learned and knowledge generated at sub-national, national, regional and international levels.

In Uganda, the work was conducted by Makere University and the Association of Uganda Professional Women in Agriculture and Environment (AUPWAE) in three districts: Kibaale, Lamwo and Masindi.

This multi-stakeholder colloquium is aimed at sharing lessons learned from the research and action conducted in Uganda to stimulate debate over these lessons, to identify how they might be integrated into ongoing and future initiatives and to identify emerging issues.

Objectives:

  1. Provide feedback to the stakeholders regarding the findings of the study
  2. Facilitate multi-stakeholder discussions on various aspects of forest tenure reforms implementation
  3. Generate some recommendations for improving forest tenure reform implementation in Uganda as well as securing tenure rights of local communities

Further reading:

Related project site:

Donors:

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CIFOR at COP23

Under the Presidency of Fiji, the UN Climate Change secretariat with the support of Germany will host this annual meeting with one clear objective: making progress on the successful, inclusive and ambitious implementation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. This includes negotiations on the implementation guidelines for transparent climate action under the agreement, as well as showcasing cooperative climate action, including on vulnerability and resilience, with examples from around the globe.

For further info please click here.

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Unheard community stories – mainstreaming indigenous, grassroots, and youth experiences in peatlands conservation efforts

Peatland conservation is currently a hot topic on international environmental agendas, from the launch of Indonesia’s Peatland Restoration Agency to the initiation of the Global Peatlands Initiative. Yet peatland ecosystems have been cared for and inhabited for centuries by different indigenous communities; however, their efforts and knowledge do not often receive a generous spotlight. This grassroots knowledge of local peatland contexts and conservation efforts holds great potential for informing scaled-up conservation efforts in other contexts.

In the Peruvian Amazon, bosquesinos (forest farmers) have mastered agricultural, land use and fishery adaptation efforts in response to changing peatland landscapes while prioritizing biodiversity and the care-taking of their lands. On the other side of the globe, indigenous youth in Central Kalimantan are spearheading conservation efforts that invigorate local economies through public health initiatives in response to peatland fires, and through public education, awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns.

The Global Landscapes Forum puts communities first in addressing landscape-level issues. With science and traditional knowledge at the core, GLF events are designed not only to spark dialogue but also follow-through to impact in addressing some of the most complex and multi-stakeholder problems facing our Earth and our communities. Peatlands conservation and indigenous knowledge and rights are deeply interrelated themes, and with the launch of the Global Peatlands Initiative at the GLF in Marrakesh in 2016, the push towards best practices in these areas has emerged as a movement within the broader GLF movement.

Experts from the Peruvian Amazon and Central Kalimantan will give updates on their local contexts and efforts while showcasing their traditional peatland conservation and care-taking knowledge in order to inform scaling up at broader levels.

This Digital Summit is a collaborative effort: our panel of experts worked together to share their experiences and approaches, their trials and errors.

We will give ample opportunity for all Digital Summit participants to join in the discussion, either to share their own experiences, hints and tricks, or to ask questions of the speakers, or the entire group.

 

Background

The Global Landscapes Forum puts communities first in addressing landscape-level issues. With science and traditional knowledge at the core, GLF events are designed not only to spark dialogue but also follow-through to impact in addressing some of the most complex and multi-stakeholder problems facing our Earth and our communities. Peatlands conservation and indigenous knowledge and rights are deeply interrelated themes, and with the launch of the Global Peatlands Initiative at the GLF in Marrakesh in 2016, the push towards best practices in these areas has emerged as a movement within the broader GLF movement.

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Fires, haze and health – applied research, collaborative design and prototype development

Forest and land fires, which occur on an annual basis in Indonesia, affect the entire Southeast Asian region. Such man-made disasters are detrimental to the environment and have irreversible long-term impacts on human health, undermining progress towards achieving almost all Sustainable Development Goals. Indonesia’s forest and peatland fires are estimated to cause approximately 110,000 premature deaths annually. The 2015 fires affected 43 million people and hospitalized 550,000, along with an overall economic damage assessed at US$16 billion.

Simultaneous measures must be taken to protect the most vulnerable groups (pregnant mothers, the unborn child, young children and their elderly care takers) from air pollution, whilst measures are taken to prevent wildfires.

This inaugural GLF Digital Summit is a follow up to the May 2017 Global Landscapes Forum: Peatlands Matter event in Jakarta, and the September 2017 National Policy Dialogue on Laws and Best Practices for Reducing Fire and Haze. If you missed those two events, don’t worry: this online event will bring you up to speed to dive deeper into the world of peatlands, fire, haze, health and technological interventions for all three.

Experts from diverse sectors parse different angles to explore this complex landscape problem. It is being tackled as an ecological problem, an ethnographic research exercise, a grassroots response or an international advocacy subject. These approaches, combined with technological interventions in shelter, air filtration and air quality monitoring, represent a holistic, landscape-level community of practice surrounding the globally-pressing issue of fire and haze.

Digital Summit

Date: Tuesday October 24, 2017 at 13:00 Rome (11 AM GMT, or 18:00 Jakarta time)
Duration: 2.5 hours
(Use this tool to help you convert “Rome time” to your timezone)

This digital summit is a collaborative effort: our panel of experts worked together to share their experiences and approaches, their trials and errors.

We will give ample opportunity for all digital summit participants to join into the discussion, either to share their own experiences, hints and tricks, or to ask questions to the speakers, or to the entire group.

Speakers

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Background

The Global Landscapes Forum puts communities first in addressing landscape-level issues. With science and traditional knowledge at the core, GLF events are designed not only to spark dialogue but also follow-through to impact in addressing some of the most complex and multi-stakeholder problems facing our earth and our communities. Peatlands, fire, haze and health are deeply interrelated themes, and with the launch of the Global Peatlands Initiative at the GLF in Marrakesh in 2016, the push towards best practices in these areas has emerged as a movement within the broader GLF movement.

 

Key questions

Landscapes/ ecological perspective – Herry (CIFOR)

Ethnographic perspective – Steve (RCA)

Human-centred design thinking (3 prototypes) – Lody (Pulse Lab)

Rapid testing of the ‘haze emergency kit’ – Nanis (Kopernik) and JP (independent) 

  • What are people’s common practices to cope with the haze? How effective are these practices? What are the challenges in adopting these practices?
  • What alternative solutions are there? Is there a cheap, easy-to-adopt risk reduction solution for indoor areas?

Grassroots response to the 2015 fires – Lina (Ranu Welum) and Wally (BRB)

  • How did we create safe spaces for communities exposed to haze?
  • What are some considerations designers and frontline (community) responders need to prepare for?

Advocacy on standards and SDGs – Richard (UNICEF) and Johan (UNE)

GLF resources:

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Effective tools for understanding, managing and accelerating impact

Measuring “performance” in the private sector seems easy: reduce cost and increase profit.

We face more challenges in the development sector, or in the wider non-profit world. How do we measure the performance of a development organisation/project? Most will say: “Easy… By measuring our impact”.

Then, the question is “how do we measure our impact”?

How do we design effective measurement tools for the understanding, management and acceleration of impact?

In our next webinar, we are teaming up with GFAR’s partner organisations COSA (Committee on Sustainability Assessment) and GLF (the Global Landscapes Forum) to find the answers.

Working with governments, development agencies and major corporations, COSA has evolved innovative and very pragmatic and science-based approaches that work.

Daniele Giovannucci, President of COSA, will share some of the state of the art solutions developed by COSA, a consortium of institutions fostering effective ways to measure and understand sustainability in the agri-food sector.

He will be joined by other COSA colleagues and representatives from the Government of Mexico, award-winning corporations and a leading international NGO to discuss the pragmatic ways they apply COSA metrics to drive their innovations and sustainability practices.

COSA tools cover a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from impact assessments to performance monitoring, and are suitable for both micro and macro levels of analysis, progressing from the farm household, to the producer organization, and up to the landscape level. For all COSA tools, open access and comparability are regarded as key for intelligent testing and scaling.

The “questions and answers” session with our public audience will be moderated by David Thomas from the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), a multi-faceted and experienced development specialist. As such, this webinar is also part of the series of “GLF Digital Summits” discussing sustainable development in eco-systems, spanning the spectrum across food security, eco-systems and sustainable/integrated landscape development/research. (Check out the first GLF Digital Summit too!)

So, join us in our next webinar!

Join us!

Date: Thursday October 26 – at 15:00 Rome time (13:00 GMT)
Duration: 2 hours
(Use this tool to help you convert “Rome time” to your timezone)

This webinar is a collaborative effort: our panel of experts worked together to share their experiences and approaches, their trials and errors.

We will give ample opportunity for all webinar participants to join into the discussion, either to share their own experiences, hints and tricks, or to ask questions to the speakers, or to the entire group.

Register now!

You can register for this webinar by filling in this simple registration form
(or use the link http://bit.ly/brace-for-the-impact)

We will send you a confirmation email. You will get a reminder with the technical details to join the webinar, one day before the event.

Register fast! Our webinars are limited to 100 participants and the available “seats” are often taken in a matter of days. We encourage participants to actively engage in our webinars with feedback, questions, and sharing of their own experiences.

Speakers

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Background

The Global Landscapes Forum puts communities first in addressing landscape-level issues. With science and traditional knowledge at the core, GLF events are designed not only to spark dialogue but also follow-through to impact in addressing some of the most complex and multi-stakeholder problems facing our earth and our communities. Measuring progress towards climate and development goals is on of the five central themes of the Global Landscapes Forum.

 

Key questions

  1. How is measuring sustainability different from other metrics in agriculture?
  2. Costs for fieldwork and analysis limit good research. I understand that you are making the collection of sustainability data more affordable. How?
  3. There are so many ways to measure, how do you decide what indicators you should use to measure sustainable practices?
  4. Companies are increasingly engaged in credible or not so credible sustainability efforts across global supply chains. Why do companies seem to do so poorly and stumble around real sustainability?
  5. Who are the end users for the sustainability data and analysis you provide?
  6. How do you account for the differences in agro-ecological zones or regions when you note that indicators are standardized?
  7. How can a company or development agency integrate sustainability data into its regular operations?
  8. How do you know if sustainability data is credible and reliable?

If you have any questions on impact measurement and impact tools, before the webinar, then just drop them in, as a comment underneath this blog. We value your input!

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