The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) launched a new and expanded phase in 2017, holding for the first time a stand-alone event at year-end. The forum was a success — more than 1 000 people from 103 countries attended; nearly 40 million engaged across social media networks, while 51 000 connected remotely from 114 different countries.

FAO, represented by the FLRM, Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) and the Land and Water Division, was significant on several fronts:

• Leading the organization and representing FAO at 3 events:
  o Growing Forest & Landscape Restoration Finance
  o Monitoring progress towards the Bonn challenge: where are we?
  o Marketplaces for catalysing restoration finance in Africa
• Scoping FAO’s contributions to the different pavilions and ensuring visibility of FAO publications from different divisions
• Contributing to organization of two FAO-led discussion forums: Landscape restoration for food security and resilient livelihoods; and developing a common framework for implementation at scale.
• Networking and discussing collaboration opportunities with several key partners
• Attending the GLF General Assembly

Discussion forums organized by FAO with World Bank, CIFOR, WRI  and IUCN  were the only two events directly focused on integrated landscape management including food security and livelihoods.

The first discussion forum explored the connection between landscape restoration, food security and livelihoods and gave an opportunity for practitioners and promoters of landscape approaches to highlight experiences, from community to national level, and share their success stories. The session included cases that highlighted the development of integrated landscape/territorial management plans; innovative financing mechanisms; exploring value chains that optimize integrated landscape production; cross sectoral policy processes and platforms; strengthening institutional capacity of smallholders, producers and local government; tools for assessing optimum ecological, social and economic benefits from restored mosaic landscapes. Lessons were shared from experiences in Rwanda, Malawi, Bolivia, and Italy.

The session set the stage for a second discussion forum that built on “lessons learned from the ground”, during which practitioners and promoters of landscape approaches shared experiences from community to national level, and focused on developing a common framework for support and a set of practical recommendations in order to provide more effective support to country efforts at landscape restoration for enhanced food security, livelihoods and related objectives. A moderated roundtable allowed a wide variety of perspectives to be shared and fed into developing the common framework.

The new FAO publication, “Landscapes for life” was launched during GLF and was well received. This GLF was very well organized and continues to be a good networking event with potential for more active collaborative planning

For more information please contact the FLRM team at [email protected].