PolOpT presented as a tool to advance land restoration goals at forestry policy dialogue in Maputo
At the Collaborative Partnership on Forests event, FAO highlights how optimizing government spending on food and agriculture can also support land restoration efforts and sustainable land management across Southern Africa.
The Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) presented its Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT) during the session on Policy Alignment for Forests organized under the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF). The session formed part of the Third Regional Stakeholders Workshop for Southern Africa under the GEF-7 Dryland Sustainable Landscapes Impact Programme, held in Maputo, Mozambique.
During the presentation, titled “Smarter agrifood policies with PolOpT – Integrating economic, social, climate and land-restoration goals,” Marco V. Sánchez, Deputy Director of the Agrifood Economics and Policy Division at FAO and one of the developers behind PolOpT, highlighted how the tool supports governments in designing evidence-based agrifood policies that now factor in environmental goals.
By integrating economic, social, climate, and land-restoration dimensions, PolOpT can help policymakers to turn the current food and agriculture budget into an optimized budget that helps makes healthy diets more affordable, reduce rural poverty, create off-farm jobs, and boost agrifood output, while simultaneously improving environmental and climate outcomes.
More concretely for forests, the new environmental features integrated into PolOpT enable countries to design a budget that could reduce CO₂ emissions from agrifood production and the amount of land needed to produce in agriculture, thus supporting mitigation efforts and freeing up areas for reforestation and ecosystem restoration.
Highlighting the link between forests and the agriculture sector, Zhimin Wu, Chair of the CPF and Director of Forestry at FAO, said: “Forests are indispensable for agriculture, and we cannot afford to treat the forest and agriculture sectors in isolation from each other”.
The presentation of PolOpT for forests attracted interest from several countries represented at the Southern Africa policy and knowledge-exchange event, some of which have started to request to FAO support to apply PolOpT in their contexts within the umbrella of Global Environment Facility’s initiatives.
About the Collaborative Platform on Forests (CPF)
The CPF – an innovative, voluntary, interagency partnership of 16 international organizations with substantial programmes on forests – works collectively to support countries and the UN Forum on Forests in these efforts.
- See more on this event
- See tweets here and here.
Contact
Marco V. Sánchez Deputy Director, Agrifood Economics and Policy, FAO [email protected]