• Deforestation and Climate Pressures: Deforestation is slowing, but forests are increasingly vulnerable to climate-related stressors like wildfires and pests, leading to significant carbon emissions.
• Innovation Imperatives: Innovations in technology, policy, social engagement, and finance are critical to enhancing forest conservation, restoration, and sustainable use.
• Inclusive and Responsible Approaches: Addressing barriers to innovation and ensuring inclusive, gender-responsive strategies are essential for equitable and effective forest sector advancements.

The post The State of the World’s Forests 2024 appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.

The briefing identifies three main categories of constraints impacting gender equality within agrifood systems: structural barriers, land tenure, and resource access. Through case studies from Guatemala, Indonesia, and Kenya, it explores initiatives aimed at addressing these issues. The insights gleaned from these studies offer valuable lessons to understand what has worked to drive changes in behavior and practice.

Key messages

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About GLF Nairobi 2023: ‘A new Vision for Earth’

The GLF Nairobi 2023 Hybrid Conference, held on October 11 and 12, convened global thought leaders to set the stage for COP28, the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference. This pivotal event mobilised action on critical issues affecting humanity, biodiversity, and our planet.

The conference featured two focused days: Day 1 centered on “Africa’s Sovereign Solutions,” exploring pathways to a sustainable and prosperous future for the continent. Day 2, dedicated to climate, aimed to craft a “Survival Guide for a Planet in Crisis,” paving the way for a fairer world ahead of COP28.

GLF Nairobi brought together a diverse coalition of influential voices, ranging from scientists, activists, and Indigenous leaders to financiers, women, youth, policymakers, and private sector representatives. As a united front, we collectively championed change and passionately advocated for meaningful action in these pivotal times.

About this session

Secure land rights and legal tenure are crucial to sustainable forest landscape restoration (FLR) as they can shape the willingness of local actors to engage and invest in FLR efforts. At the same time, access to land and land use are shaped by gender relations.

This session aims to shed light on these issues, highlighting the importance of a rights-based and gender-sensitive FLR approach. It brings in examples from Madagascar and Ethiopia, where the certification of FLR areas is in progress. Starting with a keynote by BMZ, with input from representatives of local user groups and NGOs engaged in the certification process, this session examines key challenges, success factors and lessons learned at the intersection of land rights, gender and FLR.

Resource

• Catalogue FONCIER-RPF (French)

The post Women as Agents of Change: Securing Land Rights for Sustainable Forest Landscape Restoration appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.

As humanity lurches from one crisis to another, women worldwide are building solutions to one of the gravest threats of all: climate change.

For International Women’s Day (IWD), observed on 8 March 2023, the Global Landscapes Forum is honoring 16 Women Restoring the Earth on the frontline of the climate and biodiversity crises.

These outstanding women are the faces of innovation in science, technology, art, public policy, sustainable business, environmental activism, journalism, litigation, climate finance, international climate treaty negotiations, and global grassroots ecosystem restoration.

Get inspired by their stories!
See the full list

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About GLF Africa 2022

GLF Africa 2022: How to build an equitable, resilient food future brought together over 8,500 participants from 122 countries and featured 182 leading scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, financiers, youth and government leaders, and 68 incredible partners to explore African solutions to the global food crisis caused by climate change, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. 

Across 31 plenaries, interactive sessions, launches, virtual tours, dialogues, performances, and a job fair, the digital conference explored ways to transform the future of food through healthy landscapes, equitable access to land, and shorter, greener value chains. Messages spread on social media rallied 26 million people around concrete ways for Africa to regain its food sovereignty.

Ensuring equitable land access for everyone

This session brings together researchers, environmental activists, and local actors from the ground to discuss how inequitable land tenure arrangements affect the daily lives of local people and how different communities have approached the issue. They also provide examples of existing collaborations that ensure landscape rights for everyone: 

• Diane Ndarbawa, a young activist from north Cameroon who works in the promotion of access to land for girls and women, states that ensuring equitable land access, use, and governance to women and youth can’t be achieved without including them both in the decision-making process.
• Busari Kunle, an environmentalist, and a registered Surveyor in Construction firms in the Niger Delta believes in giving women and youth power to land use and governance without any interference, and promoting cooperatives for women’s banking as a tool for investment.
• Irene Ojuok, a senior researcher at the Right Livelihood College (RLC) in Kenya, speaks about the challenges women and youth face to access land and how granting access to them can help to build resilience against climate change. Kenyan dryland advocate, Charity Lanoi also adds to the importance of addressing cultural context by seeking permission from the elders and husbands in the community to carry out such projects.

Don’t miss this amazing Virtual tour through Cameroon and Kenya’s beautiful landscapes

The post Land tenure rights: a reality check appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.

• There is a great opportunity for international actors to engage. Fostering a responsible land policy that is based on international policy frameworks like the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) has become a major concern.
• The Global Programme is a multidimensional program that contributes to global sustainable development goals by improving the land rights situation in selected countries.
• Multi-stakeholder dialogues are key to conflict resolution processes and this in turn enhances the likelihood of responsible investments in land.

Securing land rights across the globe

Examples of the core activities of the Global Programme include:

• The sensitization of partner institutions and local people in Benin
• The establishment of mechanisms to monitor and solve land conflicts in Laos
• Participatory land registration and titling in central and eastern Uganda
• Support to enhance management of individually owned land in Laos

Learn more about The Global Programme Responsible Land Policy and Why land rights matter

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• Securing land rights is a necessary but not sufficient step towards women’s empowerment. Land rights have profound implications on women’s ability to enjoy their rights in practice, however, land rights alone do not lead automatically to a situation where women can also benefit from their land.
• Empowering women through additional measures that foster/teach technical skills and self-confidence such as training is necessary for women to capitalize on already documented land rights.
• We need to consider a holistic change process that recognizes that improving self-belief/agency (individual) and policy and institutional settings (system structures) alone do not lead to sustainable change. Other dimensions, such as power dynamics and decision-making (relational) plus norms and stereotypes (socio-cultural) have to be addressed as well.
• We must work with women, but also their husbands, village elders, community members, lawmakers, and politicians alike to encourage the change we want to see.

The positive impact of securing women’s land rights

Evidence demonstrates women’s secured land use rights can improve women’s socio-economic situation, and promote women’s right to co-determination in the household and autonomy outside of the household.

For example, in Uganda, 75 % of women and men began to jointly decide land matters when land certificates were issued in the name of the family instead of the household head.

Other examples from the field to promote change:

• Support for women‘s cooperatives in Benin
• Women‘s job creation through recruitment favoring female candidates in Madagascar
• Targeted inclusion of female investors in Uganda
• Training of women‘s associations in advocacy and lobbying techniques in Madagascar
• Engaging women as members of mapping and dispute resolution teams (Uganda)

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• The TMG Think Tank TSG model is an alternative farmer-to-farmer knowledge diffusion approach. It is based on a network of community-based agents, locally referred to as «Tem Sesiabun Gorado».
• The model aims to ensure effective knowledge sharing and sustainable farming technology diffusion from project beneficiaries to communities.
• Including women and men equally, as community-based agents have proven to reduce gender imbalances among farmer-learners across generations of learners.

About The Tem Sesiabun Gorado technology diffusion model in Benin

In most African countries such as Benin, sustainable land management (SLM) technologies have been promoted by using various project extension approaches, including farmer’s training, visits, demonstration plots, and workshops.

These approaches are targeted based on biased criteria that tend to prioritize wealthy, progressive farmers, often known by extension agents as early adopters, excluding smallholder farmers, in particular women and youth.

The Tem Sesiabun Gorado (TSG) model is a farmer-to-farmer technology diffusion model that seeks to overcome conventional extension approaches, in particular with respect to accountability mechanisms and sustaining the motivation of farmer trainers.

Lessons learned from the model implementation

• The number of farmers reached expanded – the model reached out to 1055 new farmers, 38% of them women, across the two villages.
• Farmers’ networks extend project reach – ownership to communities has proven to stimulate farmers’ social responsibility, accountability, and self-initiative. This empowers farmers to activate their networks.
• Women’s leadership reduces the gender gap among trained farmers –  assigning leadership roles to women is likely to increase the number of women among the project’s indirect beneficiaries.
• Making use of farmers’ capacities increases effectiveness – transferring responsibility for the diffusion process to farmers proved to be more effective than conventional approaches to the promotion of SLM technology.
• Self-sustaining production increases post-project sustainability – providing seed inputs to farmer-learners encourages participants to establish their own seed stock reducing the communities’ dependency on external funding.

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GLF Amazonia 2021: As it happened

How women are restoring Amazonia

Women in Amazonia face a variety of barriers, but when given the opportunity, they can be strong leaders in conservation and sustainable development, says Deborah Delgado Pugley, associate professor and researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP).

Watch the full session video here.

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