Drylands & Forest and Landscape Restoration Monitoring Week
Expert workshop
FAO Headquarters, Rome, 26-29 April 2016
Background and rationale
Countries worldwide demonstrate a growing concern with regard to land degradation. Over the past years, a number of international agreements, initiatives and countries’ commitments to stop degrading land and promote restoration and sustainable management of landscapes have been endorsed, such as the SDGs, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration on Forests, the Land Degradation Neutrality target, the 20x20 Initiative or the African Union Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative.
An emerging concept which is gaining momentum across the globe and plays a significant role to catalyze restoration of degraded lands is Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR). FLR looks at the rehabilitation of degraded lands within the landscape – the heterogeneous mosaic of different land uses across a large area of land or a watershed. To accompany that effort, FAO launched the FLR Mechanism in 2014 to support countries in meeting their restoration commitments, including assistance on monitoring and reporting efforts at national, regional and international scales.
At the request of member countries and in collaboration with a wide range of partners, FAO launched the Drylands Restoration Initiative (DRI) with the aim of capturing, monitoring and sharing knowledge gained in dryland restoration initiatives worldwide. Further to this, in January 2015 FAO, together with the World Resources Institute (WRI), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the funding support from the European Union/ACP, organized the first Drylands Monitoring Week under the theme “Monitoring and Assessment of Drylands: Forests, Rangelands, Trees and Agrosilvopastoral Systems” that led to the Rome Promise on Monitoring and Assessment of Drylands for Sustainable Management and Restoration.
Objectives
Objectives
Against this background, FAO and partners have decided to organize a second week involving the collaborative Rome Promise network and other organizations and experts interested in the monitoring of Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR), with the objectives of jointly:
- Review the Rome Promise on Monitoring and Assessment of Drylands for Sustainable Management and Restoration, progress to date and the way forward;
- Consolidating a roadmap to support countries’ efforts in monitoring and reporting on FLR globally.
Expected outputs
Expected outputs
This expert meeting is expected to come out with the following main outputs:
- A revised roadmap for the Rome Promise on Monitoring and Assessment of Drylands for Sustainable Management and Restoration;
- A roadmap to support FLR monitoring efforts globally;
- A shared understanding of the concepts, opportunities and respective roles of partners in implementation of these roadmaps;
- A proposal for a Committee on Forestry working group on drylands forests and agrosilvopastoral systems.
Presentations
Presentations
Day 1
- FAO Conceptual Framework for the Workshop
- The Rome Promise and road map
- Trees, forests in drylands: the first global assessment
- FAO & WRI's Credible information to see trees grow
- Participatory assessment of land degradation and sustainable land management in grassland and pastoral systems
- Decision Support for Mainstreaming and Scaling out of Sustainable Land Management
- Fisheries in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa
- Forest Landscape Restoration: Perspectives and ongoing activities
- Global Restoration Initiative
- Forest and landscape restoration: UNEP’s ongoing activities + some perspectives on monitoring
- Forest Landscape Restoration: Perspectives and ongoing activities
- FLR within the wider integrated landscape management scope
- A common language for forest and land cover monitoring
- FAO Forest and Landscape Restoration mechanism
- Reporting for new SDGs and, in particular, Land Degradation Neutrality Target
- Reporting GHG emissions to the UNFCCC
- Reporting to the Bonn Challenge
- Towards a COFO Working Group on Dryland forests and agrosilvopastoral systems
Day 2
- Take home messages from Day 1
- Monitoring System for Action Against Desertification project in support of Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel initiative
- Central Truong Son Landscape, Vietnam – and beyond
- How indicators are born
- FAO monitoring and reporting tool for FLR in Drylands
- Indicators to monitor socio-economic effects of FLR projects
- Working group 1: Socio-economic indicators
- Working group 2: Environmental indicators for monitoring restoration
- Working group 3: FLR Governance & Enabling conditions
Day 3
- Recapitulation day 2
- Forest and Landscape Restoration: The World Bank perspectives and ongoing activities
- Overview of monitoring tools from the perspective of restoration ecology and natural capital
- Towards a mapping of tools and approaches for monitoring FLR
- Forest and Climate Change After Paris: Opportunities and Risks
- Working Group 1 - FAO’s framework for Capacity Development
- Working Group 2 - Towards a roadmap for monitoring FLR
- Working Group 3 - Great Green Wall Restoration: A regional perspective
Day 4