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It’s that time of year again! FAO’s Dryland Forestry and South-South and Triangular Cooperation teams have joined together with UNCCD in honour of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. This year, the day focused on an important topic: ‘Rising up from drought together’.  Droughts are among the greatest threats to sustainable development affecting both developing and developed countries, and this is especially true for dryland communities: droughts only exacerbate the land degradation already taking place in many dryland areas. Women are disproportionately affected by the negative impacts linked to this, but also hold the solutions.

To mark the event, FAO’s WeCaN initiative held its second enrichment session to raise the profile and increase the participation of women-led organizations in dryland areas, helping them make their voices heard on the global stage. The nexus between women’s participation and drought is the focus of the “Women Leadership and Advocacy Actions in Climate Change Negotiation” series and the second enrichment session will focus on looking back on, and learning lessons from, WeCaN’s experience at the #UNCCDCoP15 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

UNCCD's Ganesh Chaulagai opened the event, giving a comprehensive overview of the role of gender in COP15 last month, outlining the gender caucus recommendations, the Abidjan Declaration on Gender and the UNNCD COP 15’s decisions. Dunia Baroud El Khoury then shared her experience of representing WeCaN and her civil society organisation, Women’s Association of Deir el Ahmar, discussing the challenges and positive outcomes over the course of the event. Other WeCaN members also got the chance to have their voices heard in a video about the climate change challenges they face in their areas and the innovative techniques they use to tackle them, that was displayed at the COP15.

Lastly, UNCCD's Enni Kallio encouraged WeCaN members’ Civil Society Organisations to take part in the next UNCCD, highlighting how important getting voices from grassroots realities and incorporating a bottom-up approach into work is. Enni also gave some guidance on members about how to get accredited for the new COP in three years’ time.

“It is crucial to that we support building women’s agency, capabilities and confidence to speak up and present their proposals at global fora", said WeCaN’s Lucia Gerbaldo. “It’s our mission and responsibility as the WeCaN community to address these gaps and ensure that women’s experiences with drought and desertification are heard.”

Maha Mousa, WeCaN’s focal point in Jordan, said after the event that she felt :UN organizations are very serious in inclusion and that they take a bottom-up approach which will ensure success. I felt that there is great hope for women’s empowerment through sustainable landscape restoration.” Ruth Simpson, a WeCaN member from Interntaional Alert Lebanon, said “the WeCan network provides opportunities to increase active local engagement in decision making around climate issues with a gender lens”.

However, drought and desertification are not just important on June 17^th! FAO works all year round to reduce and limit land degradation and help communities become more resilient to the impacts of drought and climate change in dryland areas. 

FAO’s latest publications

Just last month, FAO released a new publication taking a deep dive into "presumed drylands", dryland-like areas that are at significant risk of degradation in the near future, but remain poorly researched and undervalued. Drought and precipitation levels played a major part in creating the economic model that allowed FAO to project changes in agricultural productivity over the 2021-2050 time horizon as a result of clearing of native vegetation and reduced precipitation in presumed dryland areas.

Later this year, FAO is launching ‘Grazing with trees’, a new assessment of the economic benefits of incorporating agro-forestry into traditional drylands livestock management, bringing a range of benefits to livelihoods, food security and local communities.

Making Every Voice Count for Adaptive Management

FAO’s Making Every Voice Count for Adaptive Management (MEV-CAM) initiative is working to increase knowledge exchange between countries facing similar issues of drought, desertification land degradation. Using participatory video methodologies, it boosts the participation of community members in the processes of documenting and sharing knowledge about experiences and best practices of management in dryland landscapes. 

GEF-7 Dryland’s Sustainable Landscapes Impact Programme – moving towards implementation 

The MEVCAM knowledge management technique plays a major role in documenting best practices and change in dryland areas through the GEF-7 Impact Program on Dryland Sustainable Landscapes (DSL IP). This project helps countries to achieve land degradation neutrality and overcome specific regional challenges through knowledge transfer and targeted technical assistance. The DSL-IP incorporates WeCaN and MEV-CAM as key pillars for outreach and knowledge exchange between participating countries and beyond.

In fact, MEVCAM launched its Participatory Video training in February, involving several DSL-IP member countries.

After hard work from FAO, GEF, International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Wildlife Fund, World Bank, UNCCD, and CDE/WOCAT, almost all of the preparatory activities have been completed and the project is speeding towards the implementation phase in eleven countries: Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. 

Drought and desertification is, understandably, a key topic for dryland communities. To enable countries facing these challenges to build back better, facilitating the sharing of knowledge and best practices is vital. This includes the unique knowledge held by women, who often bear the responsibility of finding water and collecting food and are disproportionately affected by these issues. 

Only by working together can communities affront drought and desertification.