Invitation video to the 2014 Global Landscapes Forum, 6-7 December in Lima
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2014 Global Landscapes Forum: A summary and celebration
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Cándido Mezúa Salazar – Opening Keynote: Landscapes for climate and development
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Stephen Rumsey – Closing Keynote: Financing sustainable landscapes
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Paul Polman – Opening Keynote: Landscapes for climate and development
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Sir David King – Closing Keynote
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Shifting cultivation and forest landscapes in the Amazon
This presentation by Lars Løvold from the Rainforest Foundation Norway was given at a session titled “How indigenous peoples use landscapes approaches to conserve forests: Good practices and challenges for food security and livelihoods”. The panel focused on the roles and contributions of indigenous women in forest management. Also, experiences from REDD+ in Asia were shared, linking REDD+ with the land use of indigenous peoples.

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Conservation and Recovery of Native Seeds resistant to the Effects of Climate Change for Food Security
This presentation by Maria Josée Artist was given during the session “Ensuring free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) in REDD+”. She aimed to analyze the existing FPIC guidelines for REDD+ projects and the challenges of extending them to aid organizations and private businesses that are interested in REDD+.

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Assessment of Options for land use in a post-2020 world
This presentation was given the session “Assessment of options for land use in a post-2020 world“ and it took stock of recent publications on land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), REDD+ and land-related CDM discussions in the UNFCCC. The presentation showed potential options for how the land sector might be included in a post-2020 ADP agreement, highlighting the relative strengths and weaknesses of those options.

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Large-scale land restoration: Creating the conditions for success
This collaborative presentation was given at a session of the same name which identified the technical, social and institutional conditions for developing successful long-term initiatives and explored how they can be sustained at regional and national levels. The findings and discussion will be used to further develop an emerging focus on land degradation of WLE and CIAT – and others that join.

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Ensuring Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in REDD+
This presentation by Grace Balawag was also given at the session “Ensuring free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) in REDD+” that aimed to analyze the existing FPIC guidelines for REDD+ projects and the challenges of extending them to aid organizations and private businesses that are interested in REDD+.

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This photo loop on the different functions of landscapes was shown during the two days of the 2014 Global Landscapes Forum in Lima, on the sidelines of the UN climate change negotiations. The photos are part of this year’s photo competition for which more than 250 photos related to landscapes, sustainability, biodiversity, food and people were submitted.

You can see the winners of the photo competition here

and take a look at all photos here

The audience choice of the photo competition was decided in two rounds of online voting and was announced on 16 December:

Valle del Rio Mantaro – Peru, by Herbert Renato Salas Portugal

This is what he says about his photo:

“In the Andean highlands, like Alto Cunas and the Rio Mantaro Valley in Peru, there are species of cactus and flowers of a subtle beauty. The winds and rains have brought pollutants such as lead from the smokestacks of the mining city La Oroya. Those pollutants, crossing hundreds of kilometers, are seriously compromising the ecosystems of the highlands.”

 

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Experts have urged governments, business and investors to act faster and think bigger in fighting climate change and promoting sustainable development – and they name finance, human rights and sustainable landscapes as the necessary artillery.

“We’re not yet acting at either the speed or the scale that the problem demands, but we can win this battle,” Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, said in a keynote address at the 2014 Global Landscapes Forum, held in Lima this weekend.
 
“Business leaders recognize that the cost of inaction is rapidly becoming greater than the cost of action. … Left unchecked, climate change has the potential to become a significant barrier to our growth and that of every other sector,” he said.

Stephen Rumsey, chair of investment company Permian Global, also noted the shortfall.
 
“Only one percent of global income goes to philanthropy and only one percent of philanthropy goes to the environment. This is not enough to confront the biggest challenge mankind has ever had,” Rumsey said.

It is necessary “to think about the big picture here,” said Peter Holmgren, Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).
 
“It’s clear that the finance sector must step up if we are serious about the landscape approach,” he said. “We need to talk trillions, not billions.”

The landscape approach to land management aims to bring together all land-use sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, energy and fisheries, to find ways to ease pressure on the world’s resources, which are threatened by climate change.
 
Landscape approaches as a solution to the current climate and resource crises are a core theme of the Global Landscapes Forum, now in its second year, organized by CIFOR, the United Nations Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

More than 1700 people from 90 countries attended the event on the sidelines of the annual climate change summit, including country climate negotiators, ministers, CEOs, indigenous leaders, civil society leaders and researchers.

See Global Landscapes Forum video archive for footage from all keynote speeches and sessions

“Landscape does not have a one-size-fits all definition,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme.
 
“But the reason why we believe the term is highly useful is that it indicates the key role of humans in shaping the land,” he said.

Commenting on calls for large new funding streams, Cándido Mezúa, Chairman of the National Coordinator of Indigenous Peoples of Panama, said the “millions and trillions” of dollars, if they become available, must be shared fairly. He called for a climate finance mechanism beyond the Green Climate Fund that would protect forest communities and Indigenous Peoples.
 
“Indigenous Peoples want to have an indigenous territory climate fund, where all our rights will be respected and we will be able to follow through on our commitment to safeguard and protect the forest,” he said.

Polman was among the many speakers at the two-day conference referring to rights, acknowledging the damage that business practices have wreaked on indigenous people and forest communities. “For too long, their lives and livelihoods have been a hidden and unaccounted-for cost of the commodity expansion that has benefited the rest of us.”

Rachel Kyte, World Bank Vice President and special envoy on climate change, described the climate challenge as “fundamentally different” from anything known in human history, requiring very different solutions.
 
“We will have to fundamentally manage our landscapes differently to provide the nutrition for the people who will live on this planet. To provide the livelihoods and the sustenance to those people who live in the rural areas. To provide ourselves with the diversity of nature that we need to survive,” she said.

Helen Clark, UN Development Programme Administrator and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, said that “climate change is undermining any development gains made.”
 
Sustainable landscapes are essential for climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development overall, she added.
 
“It’s encouraging to see that key elements of sustainable landscapes feature among the 17 goals and 169 targets” contained within the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), she said.

The SDGs are a set of future international development targets, which world leaders are expected to finalize in late 2015.
 
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s Minister of Environment and President of COP20, the UN climate conference currently underway in Lima, expressed optimism that the talks would succeed in leading to the next international climate agreement in Paris in 2015.

Multifunctional landscapes and land uses are at the heart of the intertwined challenges associated with climate and development. The Global Landscapes Forum, held alongside the UN climate negotiations, creates a platform for positioning landscapes in the new international agreements on climate and sustainable development. The annual event brings together more than a thousand negotiators, world leaders, researchers, civil society leaders, business leaders, practitioners and policy makers in agriculture, forestry and development, funding organizations, and media, making it the largest, most influential event outside the UNFCCC COP.

Reposted at Humanitarian News and EcoOiko, Cyprus’s Green Eco Dirctory

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By Peter Holmgren, Director General of CIFOR, originally published at the DG’s Blog

The UNFCCC COP20 in Lima is around the corner, and expectations are mounting again on how far the world’s countries are prepared to go in handling causes and effects of climate change. Lima is the last main stop en route to a new climate deal in Paris next year, following a high-profile UN Climate Summit in New York in September.

There are new reasons for optimism. We recently noted an opening move by US and China, while Norway remains a champion of the forest game. The EU is committing to substantial emission reductions. The Green Climate Fund is growing, and so is, seemingly, the political momentum.

At the same time, there are some clouds in the sky. Guarding local and indigenous people’s rights to forests can be outright dangerous. One major concern is that increasing demand for food affects the climate. Reconciling the world’s climate ambitions with the world’s development ambitions could also be better articulated.

It is against this backdrop that the second Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) will be held in Lima on 6-7 December. Presented in conjunction with the Government of Peru and coordinating partners UNEP and FAO, the Forum will be a science-based gathering that rivals any similar conference of the past few years. Among the 91 (!) institutions that will lead sessions and research launches at GLF, we share the vision that healthy landscapes are a crucial part of climate and development solutions, and we share the mission to exchange knowledge and experiences across regions, disciplines, scales and sectors….

My own expectation from this year’s GLF—indeed the thread that runs through the entire program—is that we will explore the “How?” In the past couple of years, the interest in integrated landscape solutions has grown fast. But we need more than interest and good will. We also need to see and understand how those landscape solutions are realized under widely different social, environmental and economic conditions.

…Finally, we are breaking new ground. The GLF represents a unique, even historic, fusion of disciplines, sectors and ambitions engaged in a sustainable future and committed to lowering fences and building bridges to work together.

See you in Lima!

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The Global Landscapes Forum 2014 is now carbon-neutral. The Swiss-based company South Pole Carbon has agreed to support an offset project for reforestation in Colombia to make up for the Forum’s CO2 emissions – for example from energy consumption at the event site in Lima or from participants’ flights. According to the Voluntary Carbon Market Survey 2014, South Pole Carbon is the leading developer of emission reduction projects. It has its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.

The project is located in Manizales, capital of the Department of Caldas, in the central-western area of Colombia. This department is part of the Coffee-Growers region of the country, dominated by the scenic Nevado del Ruiz Glacier Mountains National Park, which has lost more than 36% of its ice cap since 1970 due to climate change.

The program’s activities involve ecological restoration through assisted natural regeneration and reforestation with both native and commercial timber tree species, agroforestry and a mixture of forest and pastures on an area of 4,540 hectares in its first phase. According to South Pole Carbon, the program will not only have an environment impact but also improve people’s livelihoods.

Read more about the carbon offsetting project here

The Director Forestry and Land Use of South Pole Carbon, Christian Dannecker, will speak at the Global Landscapes Forum session

Making the case for organic farming and for a low external input sustainable agriculture as climate-smart landscape solutions

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