The second Project Steering Committee meeting (PSC) of the project "Forest and Landscape Restoration in Support of Landscape Resilience and Livelihoods in the Central African Republic," funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) within The Restoration Initiative (TRI) was held on 29 January 2020 in Bangui, the Central African Republic (CAR).  

The opening ceremony was co-chaired by Thierry Kamach, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development (MEDD) and Perpetua Katepa Kalala, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) representative in CAR. The objectives of the meeting were to: 

• review the implementation of recommendations made during the first PSC meeting;
• review the progress of the project, according to the approved annual work plan and 2019–2020 budget, and propose recommendations for its implementation;
• report on the Fifth Advisory Group meeting of the Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) and training sessions of TRI’s Global Programme, organized in October 2019 in Rome, Italy for TRI project teams in each country. 

During the meeting, it was pointed out that in order to facilitate the establishment of the biophysical project baseline and launch the Restoration Opportunity Assessment Methodology (ROAM) process, FAO expertise was going to be mobilized with the support of TRI to launch training on Collect Earth Open Foris (CEOF) in January 2020. A first multi-stakeholder technical working group was set up to carry out the geospatial analysis work of the pre-identified pilot sites. At the end of the meeting, the following main recommendations were issued by the PSC:

• Fill the gap of knowledge in terms of the valuation of ecosystem services and TRI support to the work to be carried out. It was recommended again to: i) examine the possibilities of using Masters students and engineers to carry out some studies, and ii) finalize the identification of two doctoral candidates and their supervisors.
• The implementation of FLR activities with local communities. It was recommended that: i) a study be carried out for the possible contributions of TRI in support of the project presented by the public–private partnership formed by the Ministry of Forests and Centraforest; ii) the course be kept on a solid analysis of the targeted FLR areas while carrying out in parallel the first "no-regrets" actions in the field.

Preparation of a project financed by the Least Developed Countries Fund 

On 30 January 2020, a brainstorming workshop, co-organized by FAO and the Government of CAR, was held in Bangui. The purpose of the workshop was to initiate the process of preparing a future adaptation project to be submitted to the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF). About 40 participants attended the workshop with various technical profiles (including GEF and Green Climate Fund (GCF) focal points, representatives of the targeted technical administrations, researchers, academics and members of civil society). 

The workshop was part of a mandate given by the Government of CAR to FAO to prepare a new project aimed at strengthening the adaptive capacity of communities through the intensification of integrated management and landscape restoration in the South-Western region of CAR. This project preparation activity will contribute to the mobilization of funding for FLR, which is one of the expected outputs of TRI.  

This meeting provided participants with basic information on the LDCF and they discussed in plenary the development of a clear roadmap towards the preparation and submission of the Project Identification Form (PIF). The PIF will be developed as part of an ongoing collaboration between FAO and the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). 

For more information contact: [email protected]

Philippe Duchochois (FAO)