 Thank you. Thank you very much and welcome everybody to the, to the international technical webinar on the souls management and restoration. So this is one of a series of webinars that FAO, the FAO e-learning academy is organizing with a Greenham, which is a network of 20 institutions. Plus, with the UNS Cup, which is the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific. So we for 2020 we have planned a series of technical webinars on a variety of thematic areas related to nutrition, food systems, climate change, a number of thematic areas of interest. And today we are going to be covering the area of soils management and restoration. The idea of these international technical webinars are really to find a space for exchanging experiences and sharing with each other knowledge and experience and for this we are inviting a number of professionals throughout the world, university professors, UN officials, United Nations officials. So we're trying to bring to the space a number of professionals throughout the world. Today, I am extremely pleased to give the floor to my colleague Feraz Ziyadat, who will be talking to you specifically about the webinar today. I also wanted to invite you all to visit the FAO e-learning academy. It is a multilingual platform that offers free of charge a number of e-learning courses that are on the various thematic areas that I mentioned before. So we you have the link here. And so please try to visit the FAO e-learning academy. Feraz, the floor is yours. Good morning, good afternoon, and good day for everyone from everywhere. This is very good chance and thanks for the organizers for organizing this important webinar. We are going to talk today about the climate change and how it impacted the agricultural productivity and food security. And of course, agriculture here is a source of emission. And it's a victim affected by climate change. And we would like to see what kind of challenges and opportunities we have. Climate change, adaptation and mitigation is very important. And there is a role for sustainable soil and land management to play. And we would like to see how different practices on sustainable soil and land management will help in promoting adaptation and mitigation to climate change. The process we follow is an integrated process coming from the selection of best practices. How do we select these practices among a variety of practices from technical point of view. And then how to provide the conducive enabling environment that will help and support the implementation in suitable areas. And then the monitoring of these practices and other environmental aspects of implementing management practices in different environments. And then how do we look at the impact assessment and how these practices are enhancing food security and creating enhanced adaptation and mitigation to climate change. So the issue is the objective of this webinar is to look and present the impact of climate change on soil and land resources. And then to look at some land management practices that will help us in tackling land degradation issues. And then what are the tools that are used to support the implementation of sustainable soil and land management measures. I would like to bring to your attention as Christina mentioned that this webinar is also documented in the climate smart agriculture source book and especially in module number seven which is looking at sustainable soil and land management for climate smart agriculture. And there is an e-learning course dedicated to look at sustainable soil and land management in climate smart agriculture. And I will come you to look at this e-learning course and to go through the presentations. Finally, I would like to welcome the two speakers to this webinar. Professor Claire, new director of research at the French National Institute for Agriculture Research and Professor Bandy's Dolly senior research scientist with the Mediterranean agronomic institute of Paris. So by this, and I will give the floor to our first presenter, Professor Claire Chinu. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to talk to you and discuss with you remotely. It's a honor to present a seminar here. And I would like this afternoon to talk to you about climate smart sustainable soil management for multiple benefits. So we're going to talk about soils. Why soils? Because you know soils are absolutely key to life to our human societies because they provide ecosystem services. They provide, of course, they are first they were plants grow so there's where food begins there the provisioning food service. They also host a tremendous biodiversity. They are have an important role in the recycling of nutrients of organic oysters. They have a major position in the water cycle retaining trans infiltrating transmitting water. They regulate or not erosion, which is a major stress. They have an important role in climate change mitigation and they also have cultural they also provide cultural services. They are hosts of for remnants or for previews of our ancestors activity and their components of our landscape. But there are challenges. Soils are important, but there are major challenges first. Well, you know, the challenges we have in our society now energy sustainability food security water security climate change by diversity protection and health. Well, we are writing the health challenge with this pandemic crisis and soils are related to every of these challenges. So soils do contribute to the sustainable development goals zero hunger climate change life on land and clean water and sanitation. Soils are essential, but soles are in a poor state. Actually, two important reports, one by the technical panel on soils hosted by the global saw partnership, and the other one by the international panel on biodiversity and ecosystem services established that nearly one third of world soils are moderately or highly degraded. So this is really a problem. And it is particularly a problem in the context of climate change, where you probably know what are the effects of climate change direct effect on land and on soils of increased temperature of drought of increased frequency intensity and amount of heavy precipitation of sea level rise. They affect vegetation cover, but and they affect several processes that correspond to solve degradations permafrost towing loss of organic matter, especially the increased temperature salinization especially the drought erosion floods coastal erosion. In addition, the land managers or farmers do implement management options to ends in response to climate change. For example, they implement irrigation or increase the irrigation or they would increase the surface area devoted to crop as a response to a decrease in yields. This also has effects on soil state and soil degradation, for example in salinization and erosion. So a very complex picture interactions between climate change between land and soils and between the managers of these land and soils. And a figure that I found very interesting in the recent report by a PCC on climate change and land was that they they were concerned with these big challenges adaptation mitigation desertification land degradation and food security and they map. They made a map of the extent of these challenges and where they were they were overlapping and you can see that there is substantial surface area of our planet where several challenges occur simultaneously. So they must be integrated they must be tackled in an integrated way. And the one conclusion of this study of this report is that climate change exacerbates the rate and the magnitude of several ongoing land degradation processes and even introduces new degradation patterns and these they found it they had a high confidence. So what I want to do today is to go to what could be the solutions. I will focus partly on solid organic matter. I will present you several management options and discuss at the end there the way forward, especially in terms of knowledge. So solutions. I think that climate smart sustainable soil management is part of the solution. Sustainable soil management. Solve management is sustainable if the supporting provisioning and regulating regulating and cultural services of soils are enhanced or maintained significantly. Without significantly impairing either solve functions or the, either the soul function that enable those services or biodiversity and this is a definition that was provided by a file. Now, regarding the current challenges of climate change. We considered that in a recent project, recent program that I, we are, I am strongly involved in I'm coordinating actually that this definition could give more importance to climate change adaptation and climate change mitigation so we stress that we could use the concept of climate smart sustainable management of soils. So let's go back to the definition of sustainable management. According to far or sustainable soil management aims to minimizing soil erosion and hence organic matter content foster nutrient balance and cycle preserve enhanced biodiversity prevent and minimize or acidification prevent and mitigate mitigate salinization and naturalization improve prevent and minimize soil contamination improve soil water management. Oops, let me try to. Yes, that's better. Improve soil water management prevent and mitigate soil compaction and minimize soil ceiling and we could add also adapt to climate change and attenuate greenhouse gas emissions. So one message I would like to convey to you is that soil organic matter is key to climate smart sustainable soil management. You probably know that soil organic matter comes from the decomposition of the plant biomass and also microbial animal residues that it's decomposition leads ultimately to mineralization with several elements being released. Organic matter is extremely heterogeneous being made of plant residues or animal residues of alive organisms and of a range of molecules of very small particles organic particles and a range of molecules for complex matter. A complex matter that provides ecosystem services good soil structure contributes also to water infiltration and retention aeration provision of nutrients beneficial organisms that are components of the soil fertility. Now one example, one example that comes from a meta analysis made in China where you have plotted in the X axis. You may see soil organic carbon stocks and in the Y axis in the first graph, you have relative yields compared to reference plot. Well you see that the yields increase before plateauing increase with soil organic matter and maybe most original more interesting is the second one where it is the inter annual yield variation that is plotted against soil organic carbon stocks. So it is actually yield stability that increases with organic carbon stocks. So organic matter and its main components so organic carbon are important to food security yields and to their stability adaptation to climate change. So organic matter also contributes to mitigate climate change. There are huge carbon stores in the soil. There's more than two times as much carbon in the soils than there is in the atmosphere. And hence a very small variation of these carbon stores, even a variation of the carbon stores in the upper 40 centimeter of soils could have strong impacts by increasing on the composition of the atmosphere, either increasing it or decreasing it. And this is the basis of the four per mill initiative, soles for food security and climate. An initiative that aims to promote the preservation of soil carbon and the increase of soil carbon in particular in agricultural soils for food security and for climate. So organic matter is important, which management options to implement. Let me have drink a little bit of water. I will present you only two examples. The next speech will develop much more than I will do two examples of cropping systems. This one is conservation agriculture conservation agriculture is reducing or suppressing tillage reducing or suppressing tillage maintaining a permanent soil cover either as a mulch or as live plants and diversifying the rotation. It has very important effects on soils that I tried to some to show partly on these graphs and has important effects consequences on the fluxes of carbon nitrogen and water. Let's go back to what are the aims of sustainable soil management minimize soil erosion while it has been shown and many studies show that conservation agriculture decreases soil erosion that it also enhances organic the soil organic matter content. With actually and this is my upper table very variable results, depending on the depth considered depending on the climate considered and effects that are especially important when you have a cover crop that is living that when you increase the inputs of organic matter to soil. Conservation agriculture has been shown in many studies to preserve and enhance by diversity and to improve soil water management. And here I took an example from rice crops in India where you can see so I'm sorry if it's a bit complex but you can see the x axis is time and the y axis is the soil moisture. And you can see that the dots that are black that correspond to the situation with a mulch conservation agriculture the soil moisture is always higher than it is in the reference plots without a mulch. So conservation the presence of a mulch allows to preserve water and hence to better adapt to climate change. The second system I would like to take as an example is agroforestry, again very extremely variable systems in different areas of the world. Here just illustrated with photographs same approach well agroforestry has been shown very efficient to minimize erosion very efficiently to enhance soil organic matter content and here. My example is a recent paper where the IPCC coefficients for soil organic carbon storage were revisited and actually the numbers of these very recent meta analysis are quite high. So there's carbon storage in agroforestry in soils, not only in the trees also in soils. Agroforestry has been shown to foster nutrient balance and cycle to preserve and enhance biodiversity and improve soil water management. And here what I illustrate I see that the quality of the graph is not that good I'm sorry is you have here what is representing this recent meta analysis is the number of studies that quantified an effect of agroforestry compared to cropland on macrophona, the first block mesophona and microphona and the positive effects are in the papers showing positive effects are in yellow the neutral in orange and negative in black you see that it's mostly positive effects so agroforestry does preserve and enhance soil biodiversity in general. Now, if we focus again on soil organic matter and management options to increase organic carbon stocks in agriculture, there's actually a wide range of options that are available and that I will represent with photographs based on this simplified cycle of soil organic carbon in agricultural soils where you have the inputs and the outputs. First primary production can be enhanced with copper crops with greening or grassing the intervals in the vineyards or orchards with temporary grasslands and with agroforestry fires can be can be cancelled and this is an issue in several countries. Exports can be reduced and crop residues returned back to soil and exogenous organic matter such as compost by a manure or biochar added to soil these will increase the inputs to soil and then increase the soil organic matter stories. And other practices can reduce the losses by reducing erosion so small infrastructures reducing erosion or conservation agriculture to reduce erosion and reduce by degradation rates of the organic matter. So different management options and what really comes out very clearly from the literature now is what is most efficient is to increase the inputs to soils rather than try to decrease the outputs from soil and agroforestry also. Well you may have guessed that I'm working on soil organic matter. And you may have a question that is, well, can you do soil climate smart sustainable soil management with no major input no major level going through soil organic matter. Well I think that yes, I think that yes, for example terracing will reduce strongly erosion but there's no direct effect on soil organic matter well reduce erosion might help to preserve. Organic matter at least preserve it in the field. And another lever that is promoted by file is the crop diversification. It has no. No, there's no straightforward effect on soil organic matter but it has been shown to increase productivity and to stabilize income of small holders in a climate change context. So, organic matter is not the only lever it's an important one it is key to global issues. Again, here you have a report, a graph that I took from this IPCC special report on land, where you see the columns correspond to the global challenges they addressed mitigation adaptation desertification land degradation and food security. And the lines correspond to the different response options based on non management they considered and I would like you to see that one management options. Option increase soil organic carbon content has is considered to have a high, a large effect on all of these challenges. So it's a good solution and these explains the occurrence with the existence of the file project recarbonization of global soils. That started a while sometime. Well, just, I guess, one year ago, and of the four permit initiative and the four permit initiative so it's multi stakeholder initiative and they are essentially focused on promoting and fostering the input of land management options and agricultural practices that help to preserve and increase soil organic matter by addressing policymakers and addressing farmers and the whole agricultural sector. Of course, depending on the area of the world there are different priorities in northern areas, for example, or in forest the priorities to protect existing organic carbon stocks, while in other areas where the contents are poor, and where it's a problem in soil fertility there, the priorities to try to increase from the level at present. And also, I would like to say that souls with this photograph, these photographs that souls are extremely diverse. So management options have to be to be tackled have to be adjusted to the soul type. We are close to the end of my talk now. And I would like the way forward is a complex where we need more knowledge. We need monitoring verification systems for soul quality for soul health for the practices for the management options and we need enabling conditions to implement those climate smart sustainable soul management options. I would like to give you one example in fact one example and it is, I would say it's a working document. So in this European joint program that associates 26 institutes from 24 European countries so it's a very large programs or aim is to develop to provide the knowledge to provide the knowledge to improve the knowledge to develop climate smart sustainable sustainable soul management. And for example, regarding the knowledge needed, well the knowledge needed to optimize on management for multiple services delivery, which we covered today. What you need, we think is a good knowledge of the present status of agricultural soil. So soil information is extremely important there. framework and tools to assess all functions and their contributions to ecosystem services, and these can be go to identifying developing indicators for soul quality and ecosystem services defining target and reference values of the indicators, providing results based on that soul management guidelines in the different agricultural and pedoclimatic context, provide developing ICT support, ICT decision support tools and providing monitoring, reporting and verification system or the whole soul monitoring system at the national scale and at the European and international scale. So what we did is evaluating the improved management options while the climate smart sustainable soul management options well and the following talk will develop also on on this topic and two examples, and enabling conditions to implement these improved soul management for example, well this is not completely this is examples. We think that we need an assessment of barriers and opportunities, we need to examine maybe to propose possible incentives, and to do for example the economic assessments of the benefits and costs of the soul management options. So research cannot be only biophysical research has also to have political legislative social and economic dimensions. On this I will conclude so climate smart sustainable soul management brings multiple benefits. I think that our ecosystem services delivery climate change adaptation and mitigation reducing degradation and restoring souls and land. One component of this is so organic matter and preserving an increasing so organic carbon is feasible but extremely heterogeneous has to be spatially differentiated. Solutions have to be achieved locally, and they have to be managed they have to be devised and implemented locally they have to be spatially differentiated the context are extremely different. But they have global impacts global impacts on nitrogen deposition known by diversity on erosion rate and particles in the air and of course on the composition of our atmosphere in terms of greenhouse gases. There's not a single good practice, but an adequate combination of practices in a given context and the context again is agricultural system. It's the soil type and the climate. An enabling environment is of utmost importance. Otherwise, there's no transfer from knowledge to real life and what I erased the as a systems perspective is needed to tackle all these and on that I would like to thank you for your attention. Thank you Claire. Thank you very much for the presentation. We have some questions and the question and answer. And I would probably prefer to do the other presentation because there are some questions that might be answered from the second presentation. I think we will come to some questions from the chat or we open for some questions from the participants. So I would like to move to a professor pandis dolly on CM Barry to give his presentation on this topic. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for us. Let me share my screen first. Okay, so good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, whatever you are. In about 30 minutes, I will try to give you some feedback on how we could combine this land management practices to tackle and degradation. And then what could be the next step how to out scale and make them available to other people who may be not aware. So, as also Claire mentioned, we have some disturbing facts in terms of land degradation this report published in 2015 pointed out a number of things that are ongoing like, as Claire mentioned 33% of the global tour are moderately or highly degraded and mostly that is due to unsustainable management practices. We lose on a global scale, annually about 75 billion tons of soil, and if you convert them to how much it costs. We're talking about 400 billion US dollars each year lost in agriculture production. So, significantly, this reduces the ability of the soil to store carbon we heard how much important is this organic matter for example and nutrients and water. And you can also try to figure it out how much is this damage for example from erosion, and we estimate that losses through that report are about 7.6 million tons. So erosion is a problem and many, many other problems like that this is the only one slide on that on bad things that I will show, and I'm showing this for reason because erosion affects every place on earth. It's also an HR process by the way, and it affects about 25% of the European Union so I don't think it is only an issue outside developed countries, and sometimes it's due to unsustainable land management practices. The report and Claire mentioned it as well of IPBS came out in 2018 and again some very disturbing facts, like land degradation impacts 3.2 billion people and represent an economic loss about 10% of the annual GDP is a pervasive systemic phenomenon and of course all parts of the world and I mentioned Europe in that regard, and restoring degraded lands makes sound economic sense, because it could result in increased food and water security, employment, gender equality, and could avoid conflict and integration. Now in 2018 was published also the World Atlas of the Certification that was the third edition, I gladly participated in developing this product, and it opens with a very interesting saying, rethinking land degradation and sustainable land management. And then there is a saying by the Mangari Mahai Nobel Prize Peace Prize laureate, I guess from Kenya, and she says when resources are degraded, we start competing for them. So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution by the way all this I had given the links and presentation will be sent to you so you can look in and link and then find out more. This Atlas, it's a mixture of math, as well as the text, and I will focus mostly on solutions. Now Claire mentioned this but this is also quite a good report, important report of IPCC on climate change and land, summary for policymaker, and again, a number of disturbing factors coming out like for example if you see this one here, cropland soils, since Claire spoke about organic carbon have lost about 20 to 60% of their organic carbon content prior to cultivation. And so it's under conventional agriculture continue to be a source, rather than the solution, and we have to change it is we have to make it the the source as a solution to this problem. So we have a great ally, which is soil to mitigate and probably also to adapt to climate change. And what you see on the left side this was developed by the way by the global soil partnership 2015 was the international soil so many of this came out at that time. And you see on the on the left side on what what is on the red is all the bad things that we can do to one sustainable soil management, we can increase erosion can accelerate erosion we can compact the soil by having machinery. And what we do is that we release the carbon up into the atmosphere and accelerate the climate change on the right side are the good things you see on the green and those could be achieved by sustainable soil management and I will show you with practical example from also my personal experience from some of the projects that have somehow achieved all what it is given on this right side of the slide. Now soil protection and management stays at the heart, at least of the three UN convention, we heard a lot about how important is the soil carbon sequestration for climate change. And then a source on that self represent up to 25% of the total global potential for nature climate solution that was a paper just came out, it says that 60% out of 25 can come out if we implement sustainable land management practices. UNCCD, the convention to combat the certification heavily involved in land degradation neutrality, and there is also economic of land degradation initiative. And so is the convention on biodiversity and we only know 1% of all the billions of microorganisms that are into the soil that's why also a global soil biodiversity initiative. We have in Europe now the EU Greendale which is looking out for all these issues, and there is also a soil health and food mission, which is trying to put all the targets for the for the next seven year period in the European Union. So, where to find this information now I can't start this by mentioning without forgetting walk up. Walk up is the world overview of conservation approaches and technologies is coordinated by the Center for Development and Environment University of the Netherlands. And the first publication that came out I think it's where the land is greener was in 2007, and it was a big show. Here it is also a nice video we don't have the time that you can click and learn more. Practically, the sustainable land management can have a set of good things that can derive out of that like you can protect the watershed you can conserve ecosystem sustained by diversity improve production and generate social and economic benefits that are more than 1,500 of these practices from all over the world into the database of walk up feel free go there and you will learn a lot more. So how to do this, I think we have to put people at the center of the actions because that's what I showed are the big conventions and the legislation and the framework. And at the end of the day, there are the people on the ground who have to make this change. So that's why I'll try to do with some examples is like a picture can speak more than 1000 words. For those of my age probably know it, but maybe the younger that are offending us maybe don't know is the Acuba Savadoga from Burkina Faso. He was called the man who stopped erosion and desertification he, he was kind of as a star invited in the US of UNCCD there is also this video here what the Acuba did next. So how he showed he was in the garden that is the newspaper in the UK so practically in these iPads, how they call it, he planted these trees and we put it mulches and we put it organic manure. He created an agroforestry man made system the first one. Claire mentioned the good effects that the agroforestry can have and there are examples like that one, for example in consulate in Ethiopia with dual benefits for soil conservation and agricultural production or the terraces Panuia you terraces in Kenya by the way, we are going to have both countries to a project and we try to implement this practice at the larger scale. I give you another example that is quite interesting. If you see these pictures you probably think that we are somewhere, I don't know moon or Mars or this is in the Matruch region in the western desert of Egypt, and you can see this galley erosion. These areas are abundant. What in Arabic by the way mean watershed or a basin. So it was like that in 2013 and we started their rural development project was coordinated by our Institute in Bari and was funded by the Italian cooperation and we collaborated strongly with a desert research center in Egypt, and that's what it became like this in 2017 13 hectares already claimed and it's over to the bad wind communities where they grow olives and pigs and vegetables. And guess what it was a successful project and we also, as you can see until the a little bit more on the water harvesting and if I can Egypt decided to invest more money and to rehabilitate something like 8000 hectares of this erotic valley, I hope they they are doing it. So we publish even a paper and and very briefly I will go that if you see here, we are almost at the end of July or so very dry season here in train that 2016 actually was a bit wet year but still due to this intervention we were able to store almost 18,000 cubic meter of water that otherwise those would have been lost, if not for this intervention that we made. So, you don't but you don't need to look only at the flat land by the way intervention like this I know from literature and peer review paper that I, I also reviewed are implemented also in other parts of the world that that's the case of Egypt in this regard. We didn't look only at the flat land, but you look also in the sloping land of these ones, and then we built semi circle paraphrase, and we planted this locally adapted. Drought resistant South Southern resistant crops that were used both for feeding animals and I mean people also use the moringa leaves to to for consumption, but in the meantime you start accumulating a little bit of carbon in an area that was totally dry before this intervention. But since we're looking climate smart agriculture climate smart agriculture is based on the three pillar and have all people know this very well. If you look at the center, you have to have the agriculture production and increase in income. You have to help farmers built resilient and adapt to climate change and reduce wherever possible the greenhouse gas emissions so at least with three interventions you can see we even tested in one, a very onion crop for for that region. I think we were able to address all these three pillars in that particular project. Now you have to look at sustainability is not just one single intervention. So you need a land and water management crop management agro food value chain and marketing a local program because apartments have no place where to sell it. Then it become a problem you have to empower women and to have to respect also local tradition and by the way, in this particular project we did also implemented this in that way. Now, there are examples also everywhere and I'm very briefly will will show you this. This is in Portugal in Europe we have here in Europe, a European innovation partnership in agriculture network funded by the European Commission. And actually we were visiting this farm in in some time in Portugal, and this man in here Mr. Coimbra. He has been growing for 20 consecutive years with cover crop corn with very high yield, and he increased so organic method up to 3%. These are all calculated data. So, in maintaining soil health improving soil health and maintaining good yield, it could be done. And I'll show you also why not everybody is doing this man also is in Ireland. Mr. Fergal Bernie, he converted his farm from convention to organic and by by making a combination of various crops that he's feeding his animals and he says that my my fields are quite good and the quality of the meat is quite good and I'm making also good money. Another example since we are in Italy, I'm speaking from Italy now. This man Dino Masala, you see what he did this is in, by the way in Cinque Terre, this is a national park is a UNESCO property site by the way cultural heritage. These terraces, some of them were built even a thousand years ago but he built 80,000 cubic meter of drywall terraces in this very steep slope, growing grapes. He produced a good quality of wine and he stays there and he was even in the news in the national television media. So, let's move to the US in the US they have a soil health institute, and there are many things that you can learn out of there but they produce this very nicely well done fact sheet on soil health case studies. And they directly spoken by the farmers. This is three generation of farmers and they look at soil health, economic, water quality, climate benefit, and so on. And I don't have a space now but if you see on the next part of this slide of the fact sheet, there are also data on economic benefit. So people also were able to make money out of this because a farmer is also a business man, there's no question about that. There are many examples like this. And here, let's go to China, and I've been fortunate enough to visit this family in the Lanzhou, with colleagues from Lanzhou University, we are in the last platform here. They grow potatoes and corn. And actually, we, when we visit with them, they offer us those very nice potatoes that was quite good for them. And they also have pigs, they use bio gas for their energy needs, also a very simple done solar equipment. So quite, I would say also self-sufficient in at least in some part of their food and energy needs, but there are thousands of factors like this in the last platform, not only for growing corn and potatoes, but also millions of trees and they probably also are accumulating carbon in those areas. So the UNCCD has this land heroes campaign, and I was looking because it was just on the 17th a week ago, the day to combat desertification, desertification day, and they show that there are many other these land heroes around the world that are implementing these practices. So how all these examples relate to climate smart agriculture. Now we said that FAO described the three main objectives that the climate smart agriculture can provide. You have to increase agricultural productivity, no question about it and income, build resilience to climate change and remove greenhouse gas emissions to where possible. The issue is how to do this. And I don't think this can be done unless we endorse multi stakeholder approach, where all what I mentioned the UN organization and the international development agency, and the you as well, big player NGO civil society, private sector, and of course we need the academic institution and research to come all together and to draft this and try also to implement. Let us don't forget that there is also a global alliance for climate smart agriculture, not mistaken FAO is coordinating this and brings together 260 members from a variety of sectors. So where to learn more and how to outscale some of this example that I mentioned, you heard from Christina that there is this FAO of our learning Academy was launched also officially few days ago, and within the endless numbers of courses that are there. We as the buddy Institute together with the FAO and Feras, his team with economics of land degradation Mark shower were there, and then say a stringer. They walk up people Hans Peter or linear Nicole Hariri all these people, we came together and develop this five interconnected lessons here it is the link if you wish to go there. And I'm sure that you will learn a lot because we call that one stop shop on sustainable and management and restoration. There is also this introduction to climate smart agriculture. And that also you can find it within the fall in learning Academy so there's plenty of places where information could be found for us mentioned also but there is also this sustainable soil then manual climate smart agriculture in practice and how the soil can try to fulfill at least these three main objectives that the climate has and what I mentioned. So I'm coming almost to the end of my talk and the issue is how we could scale out all this management practices. And there is an issue here because we have to look what you see on the left side of the slide, it is the idea of we have to share the knowledge okay. I mentioned walk up most often farmer learn from farmers so there are these only call it influential farmers, but we also need that the researchers talk to farmers and the research I have to talk to farmers, they on real liable scientific data on long term experimental data. And this also quite important that you do things by learning. There's a lot of talk. Many years now on the cost of of inaction. So how much it costs if we do nothing, or can we afford to do nothing now I don't think we have to, the farmers have to, and us and society have to read the benefit, which includes also environmental benefit, but to do all these things. You need to have a extension services, which are effective that goes straight and tell farmers what they need to do. You need to have a self economic context, and you need to have also political support we need to have political support. I mentioned that cost of inaction is very leak very much lead to the prevention, then cure so it's cheaper to prevent them to cure. Then you need the capacity institution training and education and I'm glad that I see quite a number of students attending today so that's good for you. So I would advise the World Soil Charter in 2015 in the occasion of the international year of soil, and there are also the FAO voluntary guidelines for sustainable soil management I would be happy that this from voluntary maybe become not legally binding but more kind of say obligatory. There is the other issue that okay you have to do this thing by you need money and to do so you need funding opportunity. I would say that there are available. A lot of options to figure it out wearing the money. For example, here in the you, there is this desert initiative development smart innovation through research in agriculture is coordinated by the European Commission did you that call collaboration with Agri and RTB and look at that how relevant is this initiative to clients smart There's zero six one hands and inclusive sustained by the climate relevant transformation of rural areas of end of agri food system by linking better agriculture innovation with science and research for more development impact. There is a green climate fund. There is a land degradation neutrality from the U.N. since it is following. There is the Jeff land degradation folklore that has to go all the way to 2030. And in addition to that, there are a number of developed agencies who are like I mentioned you have a case in our project in Egypt. USAID German cooperation it held in Japan and the list can go even longer and in many cases that culture say there is a private sector so sometimes there is not only an issue of money. We did refer as an assessment on on on the Mediterranean countries and sometimes there is money but you cannot use that money for a set of reasons including the first economic and political calm. So, coming almost to the end. I posed the question, can them the soil maintaining ecosystem function and services on a sustainable way on the long run. I would say yes. Only through sustainable and management. And to do so, I give you a very practical example. I took this picture myself and we're in Armenia in Italy in 2011. And you see this piece of land in here. It is the same flop. It is the same soil characteristic physical chemical biological whatever you want. And it is a big difference between all these three parts. There is almost no degradation here. Very few number of cows grazing. I don't see any form of erosion no compaction either. Here, the farmer decided to plow up and down. And you see this real and maybe after 10 years they have become gully it would be nice to go and see what happened in here but here degradation at that time it just started. It is almost all degraded. It's over graced number of animals here and there is not a single grass somewhere. So it's all about management how we manage the land and the soil of the water and how we discussed today about climate smart agriculture and that's fine. But let's face it, that there is kind of, I would not say competition, but there are so many names that moving around like conservation agriculture, Claire described that in the US and Canada they prefer much more to speak about regenerative agriculture. I was reading the other day a paper in Vogue and even the fashion industry is producing cotton in India through regenerative agriculture, which is fine, perfectly fine. Organic farming, I give you example, there is a term carbon farming. So farmers are paid money for sequestering carbon into their soil. You can have precision agriculture. So there is a set of technologies which are not that different in my point of view from each other. If we implement them in the right and in the correct way. So this is my last slide. I'm showing this because it's quite interesting. This come from my home country by the way in Albania and this is an area where the soils are still quite salty. I surveyed myself about 20 years ago and here now there is a farm with 500 hectares by a private businessman that many near with some other people probably through implementing sustainable irrigation system, sustainable land management system and finding the right crop. As you can see, we're talking about here, pomegranates and goji berry, both of them are quite self tolerant. So they are now in full production. They employed local people you see many women as well. So people don't need to move to the city or migrate somewhere else where options are given, like the example energy that I showed, or even this one here. It makes sense. And it shows that things can be also done if we put together this holistic combination of all stakeholders. And with that, I thank you very much for your attention. I hope I was within my final location. Thank you very much. Thank you for this presentation. I'm glad that we have the two presentations. Now we shall move to the to answer some questions. We have some 30 minutes to interact with the participants and we have a quite a number of questions in the Q&A bar. So I will give first the floor to Claire if you have picked any of the questions that you have, you would like to comment on or we can pick some questions because I don't think we will be able to answer all questions. We will if you missed any of the questions in the Q&A bar, we will after the talk or answer all these important questions. Do you hear me? Yes, Claire, please go ahead. So basically just a second, what Ferras was mentioning is that we will try to answer to some of the questions and then we will also prepare a document after the webinar where the experts, Pandy and Claire, will respond to most of the questions. And this document will be available on the FAE Learning Academy together with the recording of the event. So Claire, please, the floor is yours to answer some of the questions that you picked. Okay, well, there are many questions and many exciting questions and many challenging ones. So thank you to all the attendees. I saw that there, maybe I will first pick up questions I answered partly typing, but there are several questions about the risk when you implement sustainable management options such as conservation agriculture or agroforestry that your yields decrease. So the answer from that is that it is extremely dependent of course on the context that regarding conservation agriculture quite often while at least publications show that it's a temporary issue, time of learning time to learn how to master to control the past through your time for the earthworms to be back to improve fall porosity. And but well, it's, there's a point of this transition period regarding agroforestry, it is true that when you plant trees, you decrease automatically the surface area of your crop. Because of the roles or the places where you have planted the trees. Yet there are two facts first, and it was mentioned in the question. It's an important option to choose trees that bring you some revenue, for example, food trees. And also there are situations where in fact the yield per surface area is higher in agroforestry. And this is quite occurs quite often and has been analyzed in Mediterranean areas as well as in tropical areas because of indirect effects of recycling of maintaining the nitrogen in the uppers layers of soil or shedding the crops. So, yes, it's a complex analysis. So maybe Panti wants to develop on that. I think maybe you could do you want to complement Well, honestly, I was looking at all the questions that were made and the topics are quite diverse. And of course there is not a single answer that could respond to all what was mentioned. For example, I have in here that how small farmers in Africa can improve yield and preventing soil from erosion and degradation of small farms before farmers have small acreages. So, of course, the size is also an important factor if you have to implement that. The examples that I showed are some of them that are being implemented also in terms of cooperation with various development agencies, which also provide the advice to farmers through extension services and they can also help to disseminate and to kind of enlarge and outscale these practices. This is, of course, it's a long process. It's not going to be done immediately, but it is also good to know that farmers learn from each other when they see that there are results. Kind of in the beginning, they will not accept immediately whatever technology is being offered. They want to make sure that if I change something, I need also to get the benefit. I need to have the income from my farm. And then, of course, they'll be definitely interested to keep livestock healthy on the long run. So that's what I could add to the whole topic of discussion that is being given here. One question I also would like to pick up. One of you asked what are the easy monitoring and evaluation of soil methods that the novice young farmer could use? Well, I think, and I guess Pandy will also have his opinion on that. What I would propose is what is named visual assessment of soil structure. It has been developed, I know a lot in Brazil and Latin America. There's also, it has been quite a lot developed in Switzerland in the US. It's basically taking a small volume of soil with a shower well and analyzing it so you have a guideline and analyzing the porosity, the color, the presence of earthworm galleries. So it's very easy to, well, you do not need any equipment. And I think you learn a lot from just observing your soil using these guidelines. So I don't know, Pandy, if you have what would you propose? You can use them without too much, I mean, of course you need some basic training, but it is rather quick and easy going to identify what are the main basic soil characteristics that one can identify in the field and make a kind of, like you can look at the earthworm, for example, the number of earthworms. Yes, an indicator of soil health and many other characteristics that are easy to look at. Thank you. Many participants are asking about certification and I just wanted to mention that on the FAE Learning Academy we have a series of courses related to climate smart agriculture and also water management, soils management. These courses are all related to the webinar of today and they are all certified through the digital badges certification system. So this is a certification system that certifies the acquisition of competences. It is a very, very valid certificate, also especially now that the FAE Learning Academy is actually the official legal certifying body of FAO. So please visit the academy and you can do the ones on climate smart agriculture and soils and soils management and so that one you can get is associated, certificate is associated to the course and you can get it and it certifies your competences. So you have the links here also on the screen. You have the link to the academy and to the courses and Ferras, would you like to add something? Thank you very much. I'm sorry I was doped from the call. Yes. Thank you. I would like to add to the point that was Pandy and Claire mentioning that FAO is also now developing the soil doctor program where people are trained how to characterize the issue, the problem, and then how to find some solutions, which is based also in some robust but easy and affordable techniques that will be used. That's just to compliment the comment. I find I lost the question, but I have one question, which probably is important. The question is that knowledge agriculture significantly important for soil conservation and save energy and labor. However, it has not been widely used all over the world reasons and what could be done for it. I think this is a general questions for sustainable soil and land management that from technical point of view we know a lot of techniques and practices that have been tested and evaluated in in different conditions. However, the scaling out of these at large scale is still not as we we wanted to be in order to to really enhance a tangible impact on land degradation and this is a challenge because we have knowledge we have the needs, but we don't achieve a large scale implementation. And behind that, both by Pandy and Claire touched the enabling environment and all the whole process behind scaling out these technologies and practices that there is a lot of requirements in order to make this happening from the knowledge, the training, the capacity building to the finance availability of resources to start this process to the also to provide some evidences that this will work in different environments. Also to provide some decision support information on the suitability and availability of these techniques and sometimes also the willingness of the land users and farmers to accept some kind of compromise between productivity at the short run and sustainability at the long term. How do we absorb this and how do we help through the sometimes the policies and regulations in finding some solutions for the scaling out of these practices. There are some techniques and tools that FAO and partners are implementing. And there are some vital spots where we have some implementation of these technologies for example in the great green wall. In different parts of Asia and Central Asia, there are vital spots where the scaling out and implementation of some technologies are gaining some costs. Back to you Christina maybe to manage the time and tell us what what. Now just thank you very much to all the presenters. Thank you for us for the excellent moderation. I also wanted to mention that we will be designing and developing also a series of materials and learning courses for farmer field schools and I believe that all the resources you were mentioning about soil assessment and monitoring could be extremely useful to integrate in those materials and in that learning program so it's important also to crosslink and to use different opportunities to promote all these guidelines and tools that you guys are involved in. So I wanted to thank everybody for for the participants for for attending the presenters, the moderator, my colleagues behind the scenes Sara Ferrante and Fabio Picinich and Aristide Bukare from Agrinium. And I would like to invite you all to visit us and to stay tuned because we the 15th of July we have our next international technical webinar on forestry. So we look forward to having you there too. Thank you very much.