AGENDA

  • Day 2: Thursday, 30 August 2018
  • 11:00-12:30

Parallel Sessions

3 parallel Discussion Forums LIVE NOW

A Journey Without a Map is a New Generation Plantations documentary about Uganda. One of the most densely populated countries in Africa, Uganda has seen its population double in 12 years, while its forests have shrunk to only 10% of their former cover. This documentary will guide the audience through The New Forests Company journey of creating shared value in a country where access to education and electricity goes hand-in-hand with Uganda’s sustainable future. But this is A Journey Without a Map.

Launchpad structure

– Introduction, by Luis Neves Silva
– Documentary featured
– Panel commentary with: Martin Asiimwe, WWF Uganda & Patrick Mugenyi, NFC Uganda
– Q&A

Forest landscape restoration and related initiatives are instrumental for countries working to meet their national commitments linked to the Bonn Challenge and the New York Declaration of Forests (NYDF). These efforts will have significant socio-ecological impacts affecting hundreds of millions of hectares of land and forests and large numbers of people over the course of the next decades.

An estimated 80 percent of the land in sub-Saharan Africa is held by Indigenous Peoples and local communities under customary rights regimes. Yet, Indigenous Peoples and local communities enjoy legal recognition to just 16 percent of the total land in Africa. While African countries provide the most consistent recognition of women’s property rights and the greatest recognition of women’s community-level dispute-resolution rights when compared to other regions, they afford the weakest community-level inheritance and voting rights to Indigenous and rural women Rights and Resources Initiative (Power and Potential). Reform processes continue across the continent, and opportunities to improve forest restoration and land governance have been identified at the regional level and in many countries in Africa, particularly in Kenya and Madagascar.

Organized by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), this panel will draw from diverse country and stakeholder experiences to demonstrate why securing tenure rights for Africa’s Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and rural women is essential to landscape restoration as well as to creating peaceful, secure, prosperous, and sustainable societies. In an innovative-format discussion, the panel will spark dialogue around land tenure and legal reform, barriers to securing land and resource rights, and challenges raised by restoration. Where community land and resource rights are secure, deforestation rates are lower and carbon storage rates are higher. Secure tenure rights are also a vital prerequisite for forest peoples to successfully engage with and benefit from restoration programs to improve the management of forests for poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation, and climate protection.

Speakers and focus:

Patrick Kipalu, Africa Program Coordinator, RRI: Why securing community tenure rights is crucial to forest landscape restoration.

Peter Kitelo, Kenya Forest Indigenous Peoples Network (FIPN):The journey to community land justice for the Forest Indigenous Communities of Kenya.

Milka Chepkorir, Anthropologist and Member of the the Sengwer Indigenous Peoples, Kabolet forest: Available opportunities for indigenous women in ecological and landscape restoration.

Raymond Samndong; Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning and Reporting Manager; the Tenure Facility: The importance of scaling up implementation of land and forest tenure reform policies and legislationand enabling governments and communities to test new tools, strategies and approaches to securing land and forest tenure

Jean Ousmane Camara, National Coordinator, Madagascar Land Reform Coordination Unit (CCRF): A discussion of the progressive legal framework in Madagascar’s progressive legal framework and decentralized land governance system: what link between land and investments in forest landscape restoration.

Shadrack Omondi, Chairman of ILC Africa and Audace Kubwimana, Africa Program Manager: The role of Multi Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) in enhancing land governance and restoration in Africa (Case of ILC-National Engagement Strategies/NES processes) with a focus on Madagascar.

USAID Environment Office supports Northern Range Trust (NRT), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Regional Centre for Mapping Resources for Development (RCMRD) and the US Forest Service to implement biodiversity conservation activities in various landscapes in Kenya.

USAID support to these institutions has developed innovations and technologies including establishing community conservancies, valuation of ecosystem cervices, restoring community lands and providing climate services. This event will help share these innovations with scientists, practitioners, and farmers from the world. Representatives from NRT, RCMRD, TNC and USFS will present the innovations and technologies they have deployed in landscape restoration after an introduction from USAID Mission Director. The event will also accommodate a Q&A with the audience.

NRT contributes to landscape restoration by supporting the local community to develop grazing plans; land use planning; rotational grazing; bunched grazing; rehabilitation of landscape through removal of invasive species and soil conservation; and building the capacity of local institutions by developing grazing bylaws implemented by community conservancies.

The US Forest works with the Kenya Forest Service and the Kenya Forestry Research Institute to provide decision makers with quantitative information on ecosystem services values aimed at spurring resource allocation to landscape restoration and conservation in key water towers in Kenya.

RCMRD improves capacity of analysts and decision-makers to use earth observation information and geospatial information technologies for biodiversity conservation.

TNC supports community based institutions through fund raising, conservation planning, rangeland monitoring, and geospatial and climate change technical support. They also promote sustainable businesses and connect community, public and private protected areas.