This interactive session will share and discuss key information coming out of the new TerrAfrica/WOCAT sustainable rangeland management (SRM) in Sub-Saharan Africa guidelines, which have documented existing practices and approaches through over 30 cases practices.
The session will facilitate interactive exchanges and share visual presentations by experts who have contributed to documenting selected practices. The latter will reflect different SRM types (e.g. SRM with wildlife, community-based SRM and range improvement) based on cases from the three African regions of West, Eastern and Southern Africa. Following an introduction that will emphasize the significance of the rangelands for the broader landscape and ecosystem agenda, the objective of this session will help non-specialist landscapes stakeholders to visualize SRM practical options.
In Africa, the UN REDD programme has worked with 28 partner countries to successfully achieve substantial climate, forest and development goals. As a result, more than 12 countries have advanced their national REDD+ strategies or action plans, 10 countries have finalized their forest reference emission levels (FREL), five countries were supported in developing national forest monitoring systems and five countries have developed country approaches to meeting the UNFCCC social and environmental safeguards requirements.
Currently, about four countries can be qualified to request the results-based payments (RBP) under the Green Climate Fund (GCF) mechanism for completing the four elements of the Warsaw framework and two countries have received payment through carbon credits fund from the World Bank. This session will showcase good examples and discuss future potential as REDD+ moves towards results-based payments.
This session will highlight key countries success stories in regards to the completion of the Warsaw Framework, governance and monitoring challenges to deliver results as to justify payments and documenting key steps and requirements to access results-based payments from GCF.
What the global community needs to achieve has been made very clear: The United Nations has issued a massive global ‘call to action’ to mobilize the political and financial support necessary to restore the world’s deforested and degraded ecosystems over the coming decade,to support the wellbeing of 3.2 billion people around the globe. More than 2 billion hectares – an area larger than the South American continent – stand to be restored.
Whenwe need to act is also apparent: Now. We have a unique opportunity to ensure synergies and effective coordination and collaboration – both on a global level, and more importantly, on national and local levels. There are already initiatives ongoing, such as the AFR100 in Africa, which will play an important role in sharing lessons already learned, involving relevant stakeholders and scaling-up achievements to date.
The Bonn Challenge’s ambitious global forest restoration targets were set during a high-level event in 2011 in Bonn, organized by the Government of Germany and IUCN. These targets were later endorsed and extended to 2030 by the New York Declaration on Forests at the 2014 UN Climate Summit. This plenary session will bring together representatives from AFR100, BMZ, IUCN and WRI, which are among the key public, non-profit and private-sector organizations supporting implementation of the Bonn Challenge in Africa. They will discuss achievements to date and challenges to be addressed. Topics to be addressed include:
Preparing to meet the Bonn Challenge goals: Panelists will provide updates on national commitments, funding, coordination and leadership, and support provided to local initiatives.
Identifying barriers and incentives: Panelists will summarize some of the knowledge generated from applying ROAM (Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology) and other research and planning tools concerning social, economic and governance factors contributing to success – or impeding progress. The panel’s private-sector representative will reflect on experiences reported from investing in landscape-based enterprises.
Benchmarking and defining progress: How are partners measuring and defining progress? What has been achieved so far, what and where are the gaps, and how can these be closed?
With the anticipated restoration of 100 million hectares of deforested and degraded land across Africa by 2030, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) is literally the biggest restoration effort across the globe. Conditional on receipt of technical and financial support, various African countries have committed to significantly scale up restoration on the ground, to harness the associated benefits for food security, health, biodiversity conservation, climate change resilience and poverty alleviation. Acknowledging the strong will and enthusiasm of poIitical leaders, this plenary wants to bring voices from “deep inside the landscape” to the fore. These include voices that too often remain unheard in large-scale endeavours; voices representing all of those actors whose rights and interests may be at stake in restoration efforts that lack sufficient orientation “on the ground”. Community representatives, womens’ groups, youth and Indigenous Peoples representatives will share their experiences, wisdom, fears and hopes for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration commencing in 2021. To make the case for upholding the rights and livelihoods of the stewards of our environment, this plenary session will highlight the daily risks as much as the motivations of those actors when restoring and protecting these precious landscapes.
Restoring 350 million hectares of degraded landscapes across the globe — 100 million of that in Africa — is a mammoth task that no single organization can implement on its own. Nothing less than a mass movement is needed to underpin the required scale of social, ecological and economic transformations across various landscapes. New forms of societal organization must be tested to align the actions of billions of stakeholders with this effort at community and global levels. As GLF’s engagement with a broad cross-section of organizations grows, new ways of engaging with people must be found. Connections must be made within, but also across communities of practice. By using local chapters to effectively organize GLF in a polycentric and decentralized way, experts and practitioners will be included in discussions on the most effective means to start a mass movement while broadening and consolidating this for success in many different contexts.
