May 2021 - Events at Global Landscapes Forum

Valuing Tropical Landscapes Finance

TLFF with the support of Global Affairs Canada will hold a webinar on the values and opportunities of impact financing in Indonesia.
Indonesia is home to the world’s third largest tropical forests and around 14 million hectares of peatlands, which is more than any other nation on earth. Protecting these landscapes is of great importance, not only because they store nearly 300 billion tons of carbon and therefore are vital for combatting climate change, but also because they are significant biodiversity hotspots and provide livelihoods for some of the most vulnerable people.

Indonesia has set ambitious economic and sustainability objectives as part of its national development planning process, both in terms of economic growth and climate targets as underlined in the country’s nationally determined contributions (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. Achieving these will involve identifying and investing in strategic intervention points that will allow growth to decouple from negative sustainability outcomes. A large body of research exists, highlighting promising areas of intervention. Given the characteristics of the nation’s emissions profile, there is significant potential from investments in the land use sector by both private and public actors.

TLFF with the support of Global Affairs Canada will on 28 May at 15:00 WIB (10:00 CEST) hold a webinar where you will hear about:

• Impact and blended financing in Indonesia and the lesson learnt to date
• Opportunities for public and private investments in sustainable land-use
• Support from the Global Affairs of Canada to the TLFF Grant Fund

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Webinar: Integration of Bamboo in Landscape Restoration

Bamboo possesses qualities that make it ideal for restoring degraded lands. Bamboo is able to thrive on degraded soils and steep slopes where many plants cannot grow. INBAR works in a number of countries whose ecosystems, watersheds and rural livelihoods are affected by land degradation and desertification. Over the years, INBAR member states have restored several million hectares of degraded ecosystem with bamboo across Africa, Asia and Latin America and the results have been inspiring. Soil quality improves, biodiversity recovers and crucial ecosystem services are restored. With the right species in the right locations, bamboo plantations can provide global and local significant ecosystem service values. Particularly, bamboos are multiple purpose species, they provide wood, energy, food, feed and fodder and can penetrate into diverse markets, thereby raising off-farm income and resilience of smallholders.

This webinar will provide an overview of various ecosystem services values provided by bamboo forests and/or plantations, how to integrate bamboo in landscape restoration and the results and lessons learned from a case study in Chishui, China.

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LANDac Summer School – Land Governance for Sustainable Development

Large-scale acquisition of land in the global South has received a great deal of interest in the last few years. Especially following the food crisis (2003-08), and stimulated by the growing demand for biofuels, pressure on land continues to increase. This course provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the ‘land rush’ within the more general context of land governance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: the history and drivers, the diversity of stakeholders and networks involved, the urgency and current challenges, and innovative governance solutions.

The course

The course is organized by the Netherlands Academy for Land Governance (LANDac), a network of organizations interested in how land governance may contribute to sustainable and inclusive development. MSc students, PhD students and professionals from development organizations and related projects will acquire up-to-date knowledge on new land pressures and learn how to place these in broader theoretical contexts and policy debates. Participants learn about best practices in land governance from different perspectives and on multiple levels, from local to international. Topics are discussed in interactive mini-courses, lectures and solution-oriented workshops. The design of the course allows for participants to closely work together with professionals, experts and fellow students from a variety of backgrounds.

Tutorials will provide a general overview of important themes such as the global land rush, land governance, land administration and land issues in post-conflict situations. This overview is complemented by a mix of case studies that illustrate issues and trends in specific contexts, cases highlighted in previous LANDac summer schools include (trans)national land investments in Indonesia and the Philippines, government-led land acquisition and resettlement policies in India, and World Bank policies on land. The course also investigates the trend of foreigners buying real estate for residential tourism in Costa Rica, land governance solutions in countries with weak institutions such as Burkina Faso, challenges for participatory land governance in Mozambique, and coping with urban pressures on agricultural land in Vietnam. Topics are discussed from a range of perspectives, blending insights from Dutch and international academics with those of development practitioners, representatives of farmers’ organizations and government policy advisors.

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Pre-Summit of the UN Food Systems Summit

The Pre-Summit of the UN Food Systems Summit will set the stage for the culminating global event in September by bringing together diverse actors from around the world to leverage the power of food systems to deliver progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Hosted by the Government of Italy, the Pre-Summit will take place in Rome from 26–28 July 2021. The event, which is open to all who would like to participate, will take a hybrid format, with an in-person component complemented by a vast virtual program and platform. Through the Pre-Summit, the UN Food Systems Summit will reaffirm its commitment to promote human rights for all and ensure the most marginalized groups have an opportunity to participate in, contribute to and benefit from the Summit process.

Under the leadership of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the Pre-Summit is a “People’s Summit” that will bring together youth, farmers, indigenous peoples, civil society, researchers, private sector, policy leaders and ministers of agriculture, environment, health, nutrition and finance, among other participants. The event aims to deliver the latest evidence-based and scientific approaches to food systems transformation from around the world, launch a set of new commitments through coalitions of action and mobilize new financing and partnerships. All of this will be achieved by fostering diverse engagement from all quarters to uncover the broadest range of solutions and have maximum impact, together.

Since last year, the Summit has hosted regular online meetings, public forums and surveys organized around the Summit’s five action tracks to ensure the broadest possible range of perspectives and ideas to develop food systems that cater to all. The Summit will consolidate all that it has heard and Member States and actors around the world will begin to focus on how to operationalize the best ideas and commitments, to be announced in June, to close gaps and raise ambition towards achieving the SDGs by 2030. The Pre-Summit will take stock of the progress made through that process, laying the groundwork for an ambitious and productive UN Food Systems Summit, which will take place in September alongside the UN General Assembly in New York.

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Global Launch: Rangelands Atlas

Join us for the launch of the Rangelands Atlas!

The Rangelands Atlas has been developed to document and raise awareness on the enormous environmental, economic and social value of rangelands as well as their different ecosystems. It highlights many of the changes taking place in rangelands due to climate change, land use and conversion trends, investments and other changes.

Drawing on publicly available data, this Atlas provides a preliminary set of maps that illustrate the complex nature of rangelands found around the world. Furthermore, the Rangeland Atlas reflects a strengthening, global movement to protect, restore and appropriately invest in rangelands.

The atlas is a collaborative initiative of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the global Rangelands Initiative of the International Land Coalition (ILC).

Zoom details will be shared upon registration.

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Bringing Evidence to Bear for Scaling Landscape Restoration

Landscape restoration offers a critical pathway to transform global food systems, harnessing ecological and economic complexities. It requires the engagement of multiple actors across scales, as well as innovative approaches that build on credible scientific evidence. This requires stakeholder engagement approaches designed to integrate evidence and learning into programme and policy development.

We have entered the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, which signals an understanding of the critical contribution of restoration to the economic, social, and environmental objectives, as well as strong political will and commitment at the global level. However, the integration and use of evidence to leverage investments (locally, regionally and globally) still remains a key opportunity.

This session will highlight the role for evidence and science-based action to implement and scale landscape restoration interventions. We will engage in discussions around the evidence gaps and remaining questions that currently inhibit the scaling of restoration. We will showcase restoration action “on the ground” that integrates both capacity development and monitoring into the project cycle for more effective outcomes. We will showcase the concept of the Restoration Transformative Partnership Platform (TPPs) for evidence generation and leveraging at the local and global levels. TPPs are alliances, each focused on a critically important issue, in this case ecosystem restoration, that deliver a specific transformational result. Members of the TPP will collaborate to generate solutions through understanding problems, data collection, analysis and engagement processes. In closing, we will highlight an example of engagement with evidence for policy action at the national level, with a specific example from Kenya.

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Global Biodiversity Festival

May 22nd is the International Day for Biological Diversity, celebrate with a virtual extravaganza featuring scientists, explorers and conservationists from across the globe!

The Global Biodiversity Festival is a virtual weekend for the general public, with a simple goal of shining a spotlight on biodiversity loss. This is a truly global event that will bounce us around the globe as we celebrate the weird and the wonderful, highlight the challenges life faces and some good news conservation stories. From the 20th – 23rd of May, we’ll share the diverse stories and challenges of scientists, explorers, conservationists, filmmakers and policy makers on the frontlines of the race to save the incredible variety of life on our planet…and ourselves.

We launched the Global Biodiversity Festival in May 2020 with 68 speakers from around the world, published an incredible book and raised money for several conservation organizations. This year, we’re pushing the boundaries of what a virtual festival can be and creating a truly global event! We’ll be broadcasting live for 72 hours straight, with 150+ speakers spanning the globe and exploring biodiversity from every angle.

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RISE Africa 2021

RISE Africa brings together thinkers, doers and enablers, and promotes art, creative expression and other ways of knowing to Inspire Action for Sustainable Cities

Join the movement

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Unlocking $100 Billion For Restoring Africa’s Landscapes

How do we get there? Join leaders from civil society, philanthropy, business, and government for a open discussion on this key question for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

2030 is a big year for Africa: By then, governments have committed to begin restoring more than 100 million ha of degraded landscapes through the AFR100 Initiative and the Great Green Wall. Growing trees, revitalizing grasslands, planting mangroves, and a host of other techniques would provide a future that is more food-, water-, and energy-secure. It would also be a major financial boon for rural communities: For every $1 invested in restoring land, people can see $7-30 in economic benefits. At minimum, investing $100 billion across 100 million restored hectares could add more than $700 billion of value.

Galvanized by that opportunity and successful projects from past decades, investors recently committed more than $14 billion for implementing the Great Green Wall over the next five years. And last year, corporations announced that they would invest in protecting, growing, and restoring 1 trillion trees around the world as part of their plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

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