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A video recording of a whole-day conference held on 18 June 2015. The page begins with text presentations. For the video recordings of the event, scroll down to Webcasts....."Co-Organized by RRI and IUCN, in partnership with the Embassy of France in Washington, DC...
Recent years have seen increased global attention and commitment to forest landscape restoration (FLR) as a strategy to mitigate climate change, enhance ecological services, and create new economic opportunities in rural areas. Initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge, calling for the restoration of 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded lands by 2020, and forest restoration commitments within the New York Declaration on Forests demonstrate the significant global momentum behind forest restoration as a “nature-based” solution. Some countries have made FLR a major component of their green growth strategies, indicating the potential of these efforts to garner significant economic benefits beyond climate mitigation.
Increasingly, experience and evidence show that forest governance and tenure reforms supporting the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples are key factors in the success of forest restoration initiatives. Recognizing rights of indigenous peoples and local communities to forests creates incentives for long-term investments in forest restoration and management, enables communities to share in benefits generated from restoration activities, and provides the basis for forest-based enterprises and rural economic growth. Secure tenure is also necessary to unlock locally-driven solutions and ensure that forest restoration initiatives do not contribute to “land grabbing” and increased conflict over land use in forest areas.
As forest restoration initiatives scale up around the world – an area the size of France has been restored in the last three years – it is especially important to highlight the challenges and opportunities of advancing forest restoration in a socially inclusive manner, respecting and promoting tenure rights and ensuring that local communities join in the design and benefits of restoration initiatives.
Gathering prominent national and international decision makers, experts and key representatives of indigenous peoples, local communities, governments, and civil society organizations, this Dialogue built a common understanding of the links among forest tenure, restoration and green growth, and share lessons from local experience on ways to strengthen these links. It also identified policy opportunities and distilled key messages to inform relevant policy discussions including the UNFCCC Conference of Parties meeting in Paris later in the year, the various REDD+ initiatives, as well as the Green Climate Fund.
