Key Messages

• Policy and governance: clear policies, good governance, and transparent engagement are vital for effective biodiversity credits.
• Financial mechanisms: biodiversity credits can enhance financial tools to achieve global biodiversity and climate goals.
• Current trends: increased visibility of biodiversity is driving definitions, measurement schemes, trading pilots, and regulatory developments.
• International cooperation: essential for scaling biodiversity credits and channeling financial flows to meet sustainability targets.
• Financial support: needed for biodiversity maintenance, threat mitigation, restoration, and regenerative practices.
• Design challenges:
  • Measurement: credible and affordable biodiversity monitoring.
  • Demand: sustained high-integrity demand.
  • Supply: ensuring high-integrity supply with positive outcomes.
  • Equity: fair pricing and distribution of rewards.
  • Governance: robust and transparent institutional arrangements.

The post Harnessing Biodiversity Credits for People and Planet appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.

Peatlands are critical ecosystems that cover only 3 percent of the world’s land area but contain massive carbon stocks. Effective management of peatlands offers opportunities for both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Conservation and restoration efforts not only help mitigate climate change but also safeguard essential ecosystem services, enhancing adaptive capacity and resilience. This brief, developed as part of the Global Peatlands Initiative, aims to assist national governments in bolstering their climate commitments by integrating peatland conservation and restoration into their strategies.

Key Messages

• Critical carbon reservoir: Despite their small land coverage, peatlands hold vast carbon stocks, making them essential for mitigating climate change.
• Dual climate benefits: Improved peatland management not only helps mitigate climate change but also offers adaptation opportunities, crucial for global resilience.
• Preserving ecosystem services: Conservation and restoration efforts safeguard vital ecosystem services, bolstering adaptive capacity and resilience in the face of climate change impacts.
• Integration in national strategies: Integrating peatland conservation and restoration into national climate strategies, such as NDCs and long-term plans, is imperative for achieving Paris Agreement goals.
• Cross-sector collaboration: Inclusion of peatlands in emission reduction and adaptation targets across sectors like agriculture, forestry, and energy significantly advances Paris Agreement objectives.
• Informing stakeholders: This brief serves as the first in a series, informing stakeholders about practical approaches to address climate action on peatlands.
• Advocating for action: National agencies are urged to embed peatland considerations into legislative, regulatory, and planning frameworks to ensure effective climate action implementation.

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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

This interactive session delved deep into the challenges and opportunities to catalyze climate finance for nature-based solutions, especially in the Global South, featuring solutions from Luxembourg. It emphasized the importance of climate finance for nature-based solutions and discuss strategies to ensure that financing reaches local communities.

Rewatch to discover solutions from Luxembourg organizations and institutions on climate adaptation and mitigation financing, as well as form new collaborations for sustainable finance, ecosystem restoration and biodiversity conservation ahead of the UNFCCC COP28 climate summit.

Explore the Luxembourg-GLF Platform

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• Forest-based adaptation is a versatile strategy to enhance climate resilience through various actions
• It can address gaps in climate adaptation, aligning with Sustainable Development Goals
• The paper outlines ten actionable principles to effectively utilize forests in adaptation, with real-world examples

Forests are key to climate resilience

Forest-based adaptation is an ensemble of climate actions that employ forests and trees in support of climate change adaptation and resilience, including sustainable forest management, forest conservation and restoration, reforestation and afforestation. Forest-based adaptation can help address the gaps between current adaptation actions and the adaptation needed for reducing climate-related risks and impacts, while contributing to most of the Sustainable Development Goals and promoting strong synergies with mitigation.

This FAO technical paper unpacks the concept of forest-based adaptation and describes policy spheres that could bolster the role of forests and trees in providing adaptation and resilience benefits. It introduces a set of ten principles for using forests and trees to promote transformational adaptation, which were developed with leading experts from the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) and other partners. It describes the policy implications of each principle and draws on examples from diverse forest ecosystems and management practices to illustrate their application in practice.

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GLF Amazonia 2021: As it happened

About Robert Nasi

Robert Nasi, CIFOR-ICRAF Managing Director and CIFOR Director General, explains the interconnectedness of the social and environmental tipping points and proposes a way to alleviate the risks that we are facing.

The post Robert Nasi: What are the tipping points and how to mitigate them? appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.

About GLF Climate 2021

Hosted digitally and in Glasgow alongside COP26, the GLF Climate 2021 hybrid conference made a unanimous call for ambitious, concrete action to stop the climate crisis.

Attended by 4,386 digital participants from 145 countries, along with 481 in-person participants at the University of Glasgow, the event featured 400 leading scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, financiers, youth, and government leaders.

Across 67 plenaries, interactive sessions, launches, and climate talks, GLF Climate: Forests, Food, Finance – Frontiers of Change explored the potential of three key climate solutions: forest restoration, resilient food systems, and sustainable finance. Messages spread on social media rallied 41.34 million people around concrete ways to address the climate emergency as quickly as possible.

How community forestry  is contributing to stopping forest degradation

Over the last 30 years, forests have been increasingly at the center of discussions within multilateral agreements on climate. Recent global initiatives have focused much attention on either reducing deforestation by conserving existing forests or restoring degraded land through reforestation.

However, less attention has been given to improved forest management and forests restoration by local communities, which plays an important role in reducing the impact of climate change. It also addresses the many interconnected drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, by increasing resilience, both economically and ecologically. Numerous examples demonstrate that community forestry can significantly contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation.

Through this session, the Rainforest Alliance and its partners highlight the importance of community forestry in contributing to stopping forest degradation and enhancing climate adaptation and mitigation.

Case studies of responsible forest management and productive forest restoration conducted by local communities or Indigenous Peoples, at the crossroad between forestry and agriculture, will be given. We present how trade-offs between enhanced ecosystem resilience and increased livelihoods can be met.

We also explore the role of companies, governments and financiers on how to further support community forests and what is needed to scale up this support at the landscape level, identifying and addressing barriers.

The post Community Forests: Scaling their Contribution to Climate Resilience in the Tropics appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.