Event Type: Learning Café

Climate justice is for everybody. As such, this session will feature powerful contributions from young indigenous speakers as well as representatives from Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses non-violent resistance to protest climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. We will also tune in to the landscape, by listening to the sounds of biodiversity, the water, the soil, and life itself. Together, we will seek to hear what our landscapes have to say. From there, we will brainstorm about how we as humans, indigenous peoples, youth and elderly, women and men, can and should respond. We will begin and end our session with landscape poetry, and even create a collective poem in order to give voice to the landscape and to all living creatures within.

Tenure reforms worldwide have made it possible for communities to get formal rights to manage or own their forests. But what does this really mean for the communities involved, in terms of the benefits they derive from forest resources? What have been the conditions for success? And what have been the constraints? To find answers to these questions, Tropenbos International and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry FTA) invite you for a game of Community Rights Bingo. Together with the audience and CIFOR scientist Anne Larson we will reflect on what is needed to make community forest rights work for the benefit of people and nature.

This session will highlight the important roles of environmental and human rights defenders. We will reflect and learn together about the narratives and messaging around the criminalization of rights defenders. In general, it is difficult to build strong public campaign messages that can mobilize audiences around securing land rights while protecting the human rights of the defenders themselves. We will hear from activists on success stories and failures, and test what does and does not work well in reaching out to the public in a safe manner. Real-life cases will direct our joint reflection and constructive feedback. Together, we will find ways to ensure that messaging around the criminalization of human rights defenders connects and aligns with country advocacy strategies and goals to secure collective land rights.

This session will build on and contribute to the panel discussion “Challenges in implementing a rights-based approach for sustainable management and restoration of landscapes and forests”. It will include short face-to-face discussions with guest speakers from the panel discussion, engaging the audience directly and through the virtual arena of Wisembly. The conversations will explore many aspects of land rights and restoration, from indigenous people to big data:

• What is the ‘space’ for land rights in sustainable landscape management/restoration?
• Restoration means multiple things at the same time. What are your top 3 priorities?
• What is the ‘space’ for data (spatial data, open data, etc.) in sustainable landscape management and landscape restoration?

The interactions will enrich the open-access online portfolio on forest and landscape restoration (FLR) that is being developed by the Land Portal Foundation in partnership with GIZ and other organizations.

This session will gather indigenous leaders (including youth, women and elders) from Latin America and the Caribbean for an interactive exchange on indigenous knowledge and its interconnectedness to the exercise and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights. The indigenous leaders and elders will share ways that indigenous knowledge can strengthen identities, wellbeing and sustainable landscape management. The youth participants will share some of the challenges they face and their aspirations as indigenous youth. Speakers in this session will engage in a dialogue amongst themselves and with the audience on how to advance indigenous knowledge for sustainable landscapes under a rights-based framework that takes into account the perspectives of all – youth and women in particular. All the presenters speak Spanish, so the session will be in Spanish with simultaneous translation.

Speakers from IUFRO, WUR and IFSA will share their experiences on landscape and forest education, and facilitate a collective brainstorm on how landscape education could be delivered in a more structured and collaborative manner. The outcomes of this session will feed into the GLF learning strategy and contribute to the further development of the Landscape Academy.