 The World Bank and UCN to welcome you all to this discussion forum on change and adaptation in African drylands, reversing the forestation while contributing to food security. We are very glad that these two issues, focusing on drylands that have been not so strongly taking in red debates until today, and also issues related to a comprehensive landscape, a perspective, especially the pressure regarding assuring food security, which is the first MDG have been taking into forest day. And we know that we have asked our speakers to compress really very broad issues, but we are very excited and have high expectation to what they are going to contribute to these really both and related emerging issues. The forestation and land degradation are threatening the livelihoods of millions of peoples in dryland Africa. And it's needed that this downward spiral of degradation is turned and the challenges of climate change are met supporting especially the livelihoods of the population. We will have now an hour and a half to focus on these three questions. What are the impacts that climate change and land use changes will have for people and food security? How can this forest degradation be reversed? And what action has to be taken to scale up adaptation and mitigation success, especially where they have huge win-win opportunities? This discussion forum has been organized in conjunction and I would highlight this issue with a session of the yesterday's Agriculture and Rural Development Day. More and more partners are insisting the CPF to search for synergies between the agricultural day and the forest day with the aim of employing agroforestry and our techniques to build a stronger resilience and increase food security in this changing environment. The both events will explore the integration of forest and agriculture at the landscapes approach and how they can contribute to a multi-fold win on the food security sphere on climate change adaptation, on the energy issue, on water and soil protection, on livelihoods and on biodiversity. So we hope an important and innovative message come of this debate with a strong engagement of the African continent. I will, you will apologize me to turn over to Constance Neely as an agriculture expert working for FAO and the World Agroforest Center, ICRAF. She will moderate the session as unfortunately I cannot stay with you. It's really regrettable because I am supposed to participate in Rio Plus 20 parallel event that is going in the same moment. So I wish you a very fruitful discussion and look forward to the draft reported later. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Eduardo for setting the stage for us this afternoon. We have a very brilliant panel today and we're looking forward to having a very interactive discussion. And on that note, I would like to invite everyone who's sitting in the back to please come down into the front and center. It's really important that we sit closer so that we can interact more rapidly and hear your views. And we also have all these very cute voting machines down here. So please come on down. If I could encourage that or actually somehow facilitate that, I would really appreciate it. I'm very happy to, I would like to introduce all of the speakers that you're going to be hearing from this afternoon and then we're going to call on our keynote speaker. But we're very fortunate this afternoon to have Dr. Andrew Steer with us. He is the special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. He guides the World Bank group work on climate change efforts to support a very pro development approach and agenda for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Now working in 130 countries and the climate investment funds are at 6.5 billion US dollars. Prior to his appointment at the World Bank last year, many of you knew him as the director general for policy and research at UK DFID. Following Andrew's presentation, we're going to have three discussants and they've joined me up front. First will be Dr. Ben Chikami, known to many of you. He's the director of the Kenya Forest Research Institute. He's executive secretary of the network for gum Arabic and resins in Africa, the NGAMA. He's also the regional coordinator for the Commonwealth Forestry Association as well as IUFRO. Following Ben, we're going to hear from Dr. Makhtar Toure, who is from Senegal. He's a soil scientist and a policy advisor. He's been serving most recently as a consultant to UNDP, UNCCD, the Africa Development Bank, AFAD, and other West African countries. And prior to that, you knew him as a team leader for the World Bank and the Land and Water Resources Unit of the Jeff Program. And then our third discussant is going to be Dr. Robert Zugma Morey. He is the West Africa Regional Coordinator, Regional Program Leader for the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Program, CCAFs, that it goes by, of the CGIAR. And prior to that, he was a senior staff within the environmental program of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory in Tunisia, the OSS. So that is going to be our group today. And with no further ado, I'd like to invite Andrew to provide our keynote presentation. Thank you. Thanks very much Constance. Good afternoon to everybody. It's great to be here. The other advantage of moving to the front is that you can keep each other warm as well. So feel free to move around. This is a fantastic building. And I think it's a great one, but I think we're consuming quite a bit of carbon air conditioning at the moment. I would like to congratulate CFO and the other organizers of this remarkable Forest Day, really a terrific occasion, as usual. Let me ask you two questions. Question number one, as everybody knows, forests emit more greenhouse gases than all transportation in the world combined. All aeroplanes, all cars, all trains, all public transportation combined. We're establishing a green fund now, which we hope will be large. Do you think transportation or forests will get more money out of the green fund? Well, I'll tell you the answer. Transportation will get a lot more money out of the green fund. And yet forests, actually, not only have a massive mitigation function, they also have a huge adaptation function. So let's try to change that, and let's try to make sure that actually forests get at least as much and probably more, hopefully, than transportation. Let me ask you another question. One of the great parts of my job I enjoy is overseeing the climate investment funds, which are implemented by the regional development banks and the World Bank. They're large funds, $6.5 billion. Let me ask you this. Imagine we've got two projects going to the boards. One, a $300 million program of support for public transportation in Mexico City to make things more fuel efficient. Then you've got another program, let's say $20 million for forests in Burkina Faso. Which do you think the board will spend more time arguing over? Well, 10 to 1 in terms of the time given, probably, to Burkina Faso forestry, even although it was only one-tenth of the money to Mexico. Now, why is that? Well, I think there's several reasons. One of which is we haven't done a very good job at really telling a narrative. We also separate forests from agriculture too much, and Burkina Faso was basically regarded as not really having enough trees. Therefore, why would you have a forest project there? We also separate mitigation from adaptation. The Burkina Faso work actually is really a fabulous project if one really brings the mitigation and adaptation together. Those two questions, I want just to keep in the back of your mind a frame what we're talking about now, because we're not just having an academic conversation among practitioners and specialists here. We're actually in the midst of a political process with big implications. And it seems to me that one of the nice things of having the forest day sitting alongside the negotiations is that we as the forest community actually can play quite an important role. But only if we agree on a compelling narrative. I believe the narrative for forests, especially surprisingly in dry lands, is truly compelling. So what I want to do today is actually not tell you a whole lot of things you don't know, although I hope some of the things you'll think, well, that's interesting. But more to sort of see if we can agree on a storyline that actually can then empower our engagement in the policy, the political, and the financial realm. So just the sort of basic starting points here, I think people know the facts, seven billion people in the world, one billion of them live in Africa, two billion in the world live in dry land areas, 1.5 billion are dependent on degrading land. Losses from climate logical effects are huge, 7.5 billion growing very rapidly. And to compare the area of land that's under dry lands, the 2 billion, total agricultural land, 4.9 billion. Now here's the final point, compare the number in the second row, 1 billion today to 3.4 billion people living in Africa in 2050. And we all know that the IPCC and many other studies have shown that actually parts of Africa will get significantly hotter than the average. And you see that in those bright red marks on the left. And similarly Africa will be affected in a highly differentiated way with regard to rainfall. And you see it both the north and the south, less rainfall and probably in the middle more rainfall. Africa is already heating up. As you know, scientific evidence suggests 0.7 degrees in the last 30 years. And that's quite significant. Two weeks ago I was in the Becker Valley with some farmers and some scientists there, they see a well over one degree rise already. Those farmers are already suffering quite seriously through pest infestation and other reasons. And we all know also that yields could be very, very seriously affected. And if you look at that, the world as a whole and Africa has a lot more red on it than other continents and is likely to be very severely affected. I should say that there is some good news potentially for some parts of Africa, particularly in the center, where a combination of possibly better rainfall and more carbon fertilization could actually lead to increase in yields. But on average, you've all seen the numbers and the threats are very great. Now, it's worth pointing out that Africa has had very, very serious floods in the past five times over the last 1,000 years. Have there been, if you like, what you could call mega droughts? I think I said floods, I meant droughts. Starting with the granddaddy of them all between 1,000 and 1,200 years ago, where you see the numbers there and five since then. Now, why is that important? It's important because over the centuries, Africa has actually learned a lot about adaptation because it's needed to. And we need to learn from what farmers and African citizens have learned over the last thousands of years. And one of the most important things that Africans learned very early on is that trees are a very, very vital part of the entire adaptation story. But obviously, they can't play the role in adaptation if they don't exist anymore. And if you look, for example, in the southern part of Africa at the Miombo area, you'll see that in the last 15 years, the five countries of that dry land belt that's Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe have reported about 175,000 square kilometers of lost forests, partly due to weather patterns, but also due to urban needs for wood fuel, which once again illustrates how wrong we have the climate change discussion, because the 65% of African households who don't have electricity today should be absolutely front of the queue in order to receive climate finance. Why? Because if they don't get climate finance, if they don't get electrification from sustainable sources, the problem will get much, much worse, not just on the carbon emission side, but on the adaptation side. And we are imposing a cruel future on Africa if we do not put energy access very high up on the agenda. Do you know the estimates are that poor families spend a lot more on lighting their homes than rich families? And you know why? It's because they have to buy solid fuel or liquid fuel, actually, in the case of lighting, paraffin. The estimates are that if you take liquid and solid fuel, over $17 billion is spent a year by poor families on these fuels. So back to the storyline. Woodlands and forests play a key role in building resilience into farming systems in at least four ways. And I think you know these ways, but it's important as we look, for example, at dry land forests, which the untrained eye would look at and they would say, well, they're just sitting there doing really nothing. But in fact, they are playing a truly vital role in resilience. And you all know why. Number one, woodland products generating come of 10 to 50%. C4 and the World Bank have done a lot of work on this, as you know. And the amount, if you include not only what is a cash income, but you include what a household uses for itself. Poor households can rely on woodland products for around 54% of everything they use. So that's number one. Number two, woodlands act as crucial safety nets. In, for example, the Eastern province in Kenya, just a few months ago, farmers who had been hit by the drought resorted to the dry land forests to produce charcoal that they could sell just to survive. Households which have access to woodlands are more resilient to shocks from illnesses and from climatic events. And they recover from these events faster than households which don't have access to woodlands. So their role as a safety net is crucial and it's vital that those that run social safety net programs, financial ones, understand the role of nature as a very, very vital compliment. Number three, woodlands reduce income inequality, which in and of itself has been found to show, found to improve a resilient. Monica Fisher, studying the Miombo dependency in Malawi, found out that income distributional disparities fell by 12% if families had access to these woodlands. Will Cavendish and Bruce Campbell in Zimbabwe found that woodland derived income has a substantial and equalizing effect on rural income distribution. In southern Zimbabwe, among the poorest households, nearly 30% of income is woodland based. So third, as part of the resilient story, we need to be able to convey how woodlands reduce income inequality. And then finally, and sort of most all embracing of all, woodlands obviously are a total vital part of an integrated farm, forest, and livestock system. For livestock, for example, I mean late in the dry season, Miombo leaves fall at a time when fodder has disappeared. And so they are a totally vital part of the fodder and grazing cycle, if you like. And in large parts of southern Africa, leaf litter is collected from woodlands and composted, composted, and dug into agricultural fields. So woodlands, far from just sitting there, are vital as everyone in this room knows for at least four reasons relating to resilience. Now one of the great themes of yesterday and today is that foresters need to have one foot in the forest proper, but at least another foot outside of the forest. Because whilst we have tended to segment our professions, in fact, we need to think of landscapes rather than forests versus agriculture. And one of the great things about the launch today of the CGIR research program on forests, trees, and agroforestry is precisely that it recognizes this and hopefully will help us all to understand things better. Now, look, you have heard and you have spoken yourself and many of you have written about the abundant opportunities for what we now all call triple win in agriculture that comes about from trees. And the triple win, first there are smart trees out there. There are trees, the sequester that put nitrogen into the soil, and there are some that are so clever that actually they organize their leaf cycle so it actually is win-win to everybody. I mean, not only do some of these trees I told you about drop their leaves when the cattle need them, but other trees actually lose their leaves when you need the sun. I mean, it's amazing how clever they are and most people don't understand that. And so all of you here know more about fiderbia than I do, but just look at the red circled ones there you can choose. Without the trees, you get 2.6 tons per hectare of maize. With a few trees, you get 5.6. Your choice. But clearly this sort of win-win is something that we've got to bring alive to negotiators. So the second part of the triple win, all of you know and I don't even need to really explain it how trees can build resilience. There's a growing evidence that the right trees planted on farms can build resilience by creating conditions for dry season cropping. And the third element of the triple win, and I hope your eyes are better than mine, is what it does for soil carbon. And yes, it's complicated, yes we don't know everything, but yes, evidence is growing year by year that actually trees are even more powerful at sequestering carbon in agricultural areas than some of the things we talk about a lot, such as mulching and zero tillage and so on. And down there, you don't need to, you probably can see it with your young eyes, you will actually see that all of these different aspects of agroforestry add a little more than the others. And so you know whether it's one ton per acre per year in Africa for the next five or six years, but you imagine if you add all that together what it could do. This is just, look at this, just imagine five million hectares, which is just the beginning if you like, think of three values there. Value number one, the nitrogen fertilizer that will be brought into the soils worth 500 million a year. Value number two, the amount of additional maize and the value thereof a billion to a billion and a half a year. And then think of the additional carbon sequestered 30 to 50 million tons per year, which is worth another 450 to 1.25 according to whatever the price of carbon might be. This is remarkably exciting stuff and you are all on the frontiers of it, so I hope you are thrilled by the role that you can all play. Now, the other important thing in dealing with negotiators is to explain that actually success is possible. One of the most important things that we all can do to help negotiators make the progress they need to is to demonstrate success is possible at scale, at reasonable cost and benefiting the poor. And the great thing is that farmers actually know a lot about how to grow trees already and that's why that's why there is huge scope for scaling up and restoring areas. And those in the negotiations who are still saying it's too complicated, we can say well actually no it's not, farmers actually know how to do it. And we now have a lot of evidence that about 700 million hectares within Africa could be restored and the global partnership for forest landscape restoration has played a very, very significant role, not only in the analysis but also in the communication of this fact. Now, how would we go about this? Well, you know this as well as I do. If you successfully devolve responsibilities and add clarity at the local level, you can turn the HUMBO program in Ethiopia from that to that. Well, let me do that again. From that to that. It's great, eh? And this was the first project ever and World Vision and World Bank and others have been an important part of that but the Ethiopian government actually deserves the credit and the community is even more the credit. More than 90% of the HUMBO project area is now being reforested through strategies that involved the devolution of responsibility to community institutions and the use of farmer managed natural forest regeneration techniques and not only do they have trees, they have more honey, they have more fruit. The first large-scale forestry project in Africa to be registered with the UNFCCC and it's just the beginning and you've seen other examples of just smart policies leading to huge change. Niger was already mentioned today more than once. 1993, the rules regulating the use of trees on farms were revised giving farmers a freer hand and stronger incentive to grow trees and these rules simply made it clear that actually the community owned the trees and not the government. Niger created a simple land registration system giving farmers more confident and after two decades over five million hectares of parkland tree farming systems have been rejuvenated and this has benefited 4.5 million people, sorghum yields have increased 20 to 85 percent, millet yields between 15 and 50 percent. Remarkable of what can be done with smart policies and as a result many farms in this is in West Africa actually now have 20 times more trees on them than they did 20 years ago. It's really quite remarkable there are more trees outside of forest areas whilst in many forest areas there are less trees so the distribution of trees has been shifting quite substantially. Now obviously private actors are at the end of the day whether they are small farmers or whether they're small businesses will be key players and what we're seeing is that as local economies grow demand for poles and other things grow and the question is is there a regulatory environment in which the private sector can invest in forests and also make money out of it at the same time and what we're seeing is some quite exciting things. Here's an area of Kenya that's desperately dry. What role would a modern company have there? Well actually there's a tree there called the Mukau that can produce beautiful and valuable hardwood. It's a bit like mahogany they're coming in they're planting this tree it grows in 15 to 20 years time but they will only do it if they get the right kind of regulatory environment and so we foresters obviously have to spend time in departments of private sector development and trade and industry just as much as we do in the department of forestry and so we're seeing that markets can create incentives for better woodland and tree management and so this is something where there's still a large research agenda to understand precisely how can governments create an environment in which the private sector will play a positive contribution in these difficult and arid areas. Another point that's obvious but I simply make it because I'm trying to paint a picture which shows forests dryland forests as absolutely integral to the entire development process and all we're learning about development policy such as good governance applies to this just as much throughout Africa countries that have the strongest framework for good governance consistently generate more private investment and this is true for investing in trees and in landscape restoration as investors need to have confidence and finally public institutions need to be more effective and so again when we talk about money available from climate finance this needs to think about the whole story and all of the instruments that are required including here relating to agricultural extension and so on look we need to scale up things pretty significantly sorry the map's not very legible here we need more initiatives like we're seeing at the moment being launched the Great Green Wall 100 million from the GEF 1.8 billion in co-financing we need to create a political sense essentially the Great Green Wall is a series of 11 countries doing smart things relating to landscape management in dry areas but by adding it together and calling it the Great Green Wall it is building a political storyline which is exciting politicians exciting parliaments who have to allocate money and exciting delegates to the convention here so we've got to think politically as well as practically and we've got to learn across countries and we've got to put all these things together sometimes people say it's so complicated you know there's a private sector social investors climate funds farmers government budgets it's all too complicated much better to spend climate money in building a renewable energy power plant which is straightforward well yes you need to do that but you also need to explain and be able to explain how the whole thing fits together so a final slide making it happen here in Durban there are extremely clear negotiation objectives that need to be addressed you're all aware of the subject matter that's being discussed with regard to baselines and so on and to red so that needs to be done here second and much more difficult agriculture needs to be incorporated fully under the convention and we need to increasingly blur the distinction between forests and agriculture this has less than a 50 percent chance of being done this week it's a great sadness but there's still some resistance we need to be getting out there and explaining why it would be good to have a work program on agriculture under the subster that doesn't put agriculture into the basket of mitigation or the basket of adaptation but looks at the whole thing holistically and looks at dry land forestry in the same way it looks at any other kind of forestry and finally we just need to get a narrative that explains that we're moving from a distinction that separates forests from farms to something that is much more holistic that looks at triple win landscapes let me finally recommend to you a couple of books which are available to everybody and I want to give Peter de Wies who actually told me everything I just said he told me what to say basically no this is a really great piece of work on the on the miambo woodlands there's also this very nice one investing in trees and landscapes I look forward very much to the discussion we're about to have thank you very much thank you very much Andrew I don't think you just painted a picture I believe that was a masterpiece you've managed to both develop the story about the severity of the situation in these extensive dry land situations as well as to paint a very nice picture of hope and we're very grateful but you've also created a feast of jumping off points so our discussants have plenty to work with um and so we look forward now to hearing from our three discussants we'll start with Ben Chikamai and we look forward to your insights and reactions thank you Ben yeah thank you very much I think Andrew has given a very elaborate exposition on the changes that are taking place on this particular continent with the advent of climate change the initiatives that are actually being undertaken and the measures and the way forward what I'm going to do is to try and fill in with practical examples and experiences that actually have taken place and I would like to say that initiatives have been undertaken in this particular region that's Africa where there has been quite a reversal in the aspect related to reversing deforestation and of course anti-gratiation while ensuring actually food security one practical example that we have is the project that was undertaken by FAO in 2004 to 2008 in collaboration with the regional network for Niger gams and resins this was a project which was formulated specifically to try to contribute sustainable development enhance food security while of course mitigating the certification and with it the climate change and it was a project that was undertaken in six countries beginning with Senegal in the Burkina in Nietzsche in Chad Sudan and of course in in Kenya and it involved an aspect of actually integrating the tree component into the group and livestock farming systems and this one here involved particularly using the mechanized word harvesting where they were trying to actually undertake prepare micro catchments using actually the mechanized word harvesting of the Valarani technology as well as the conventional metals that were actually undertaken within a span of about five meters in rows and trees were actually planted within the micro catchments and in between the rows we had either crop components particularly we had the crops like the we are a range of socombe we had socombe we had actually millet and we had also maize cow peas that were actually planted the tree component comprised largely the Akesha Senegal as well as Akesha Cial in the cum racing species at the end of it at the end of the three years actually of the establishment of this project when an evolution was done it was found out that about 11,000 hectares were actually planted with the trees and fairly successfully and when you look at that you find that it was a massive aspect of actually tree planting that was very very useful secondly and much more important is that the capacity of the local people was fully fully enhanced and we had in areas like in Kenya where we had actually communities that are predominantly pastoralist beginning to practice agriculture their lifestyles completely changed they began to impress actually farming and when you went to check on the social impact you found out that they began even to eat some of the vegetables that were not actually in their determinant lifestyles that were previously before that was something that was quite significant the second aspect that emerged from this particular project and one that is of significance is the fact that the livelihoods of these particular communities did improve it improved tremendously through the capacity building program and sustainability of the dry land ecosystems particularly involving the local communities and enhancing their capacity resulted in a very good improvement of the livelihoods where now they are able to actually sell the commodities particularly the gums the resins the indigenous fruits and even the medicinos as actually a safety net as well as a livelihood strategy one of the things that come out is that yes when you incorporate tree component into a crop as well as livestock components you are able to enhance the resilience and this is actually what Andrew has been able to demonstrate and has been able to say the second aspect that I would like to be able perhaps to look at and the one that I would like to be able to add is that out of this particular project we have had lessons learned and one of the things is that there are very good practices of integrating trees into the crop as well as livestock farming systems which need to be actually upscaled we have noted that the mechanized toward harvesting is a very successful technology because it's able to rehabilitate vast areas of land within a very short period of time for example you are able to rehabilitate about 10 hectares within a day using actually the mechanized toward harvesting system this is actually a practice that we need to upscale because it's working and particularly for the dry lands of Africa which are really vast where of course manual methods are actually limiting in terms of the area you can be able to cover and this is what we intend to be able to upscale in the main phase which has been actually developed trying to look at the best practices of the technology and how we can be able to actually use it in a more effective manner this is a project again where the FAO is going to as we have formulated and we are working closely with the regional network which is going to be able to clearly enhance the aspects of this particular technology even to a larger scale the project is currently at a resource mobilization stage and we do hope that very soon of course it will be able to get the financing that is really required in terms of how can we be able to what strategies we need to do at the national level particularly with climate change we need to be able to come up very clear national strategies I don't know that in my country we have already a national strategy on climate change we have undertaken a red preparedness program and this is something that needs to be actually undertaken at sub-regional and regional level we need to be able to try and actually look at the best practices that can be scaled up and more importantly we need to recognize the fact that the political goodwill is very important for example within the sub-region we are having of course and my colleague is going to speak on the great green wall of the Sahara and Sahel initiative it's a drive that has actually taken a political goodwill and with that we should be able to move forward so that we can be able to build on this particular project and the best practices and more importantly particularly when you're trying to look at the aspect of livelihood and sustainability we have to be able to try and see how best we can be able to establish clear markets for the communities in a way that can be able to enhance the marketing of the commodities and that will be able to result in a fairly good cash income so very briefly I'd just like to be able to say that there are practical examples with the best practices we have and I'm quite sure that if we take this on its own board we shall be able to ensure the reversal in terms of the degradation while ensuring the food security thank you thank you very much Ben thank you for reinforcing the points about that there's not a line between the forest and these integrated systems that they are all part of a holistic approach and for reminding us about the market value at this point may we hear from Muhtar please thank you very much Constance I would like to shape my contribution around three illustrative cases drawn from ongoing experiences at community Nash country and regional level across the Saharan the Sahelian belt the first element drawn for a draw from the finding conclusions and recommendation from the first African dry land weeks held in Dakar this year and whose objective was to review the challenges posed by land degradation desertification and climate change to share and discuss the lessons and experience and to explore opportunities and modernity for scaling up successes the most striking finding is the existence of many spots of three base successes and hope in the midst of one of the most harsh environment and health thanks to the resilience creativity and vitality of the communities whose life revolves around crops trees and livestock I've noted five point that underpin the successes number one trees are back in big numbers into the landscapes after the severed drought hit of the 70s and this is done mainly this has been done mainly through natural and assisted regeneration the federbia story the regeneration process in Niger in Mali and in Senegal are the most vivid example we have but similar cases can be found in Miss Africa in Zambia in Malawi in Tanzania and Ethiopia second homemade initial arrangement are critical in making these successes and they ensure an effective tree management and livestock and agricultural conflict resolutions and linkages to market and among those home management we have village action plans rural and postures management committees policy enforcement unit fieldwood markets many but I think the most critical point is the government policy and regulatory instrument that have been revised and adapted to support the tree expansion process in Niger positive changes in tree and land and power ownership and tenure has been a critical factor I think this ownership and and change in tenure is extremely important last but not least women are assuming a greater leadership role in all segments of the community revival process outstanding challenges and obstacles toward consolidation and upscaling include indeed adequate access to technology to expand and to accelerate the natural regeneration process and indeed the absence of an enabling and supportive policy environment that will help to broaden access to market and financial services the second element refer to the Senegal's experience in inter village forest and pastoral resource management strategy to cope with land degradation and therefore the deforestation trends several village are joining effort to protect and improve the quality of shared communal lands through a variety of conservation and management techniques the successful strategy combining and assisted regeneration of com com brettum gluteus gluteus nosum using an improved agroforestry nursery similar to the one used by the aircraft through the concept of resource center with total protection of the reserve area is a case in point in Senegal but among but above and beyond the many implemented issues faced by the community they have realized the value of pulling together the resources and effort beyond the boundary of their respective villages they can't just make it by themselves they need to come together pull effort and work together they also realize the importance to be inclusive to include women's use and indeed the transomers herders that are a critical player in those landscapes and they are also realize the need for strong and effective management structure structures until at the multi village scale so need for code of conduct for multi village governance structures linkage with government with local government I think were extremely important issues outstanding constant still include the slow evolution of the forest service repressive attitude they're still around acting like gender and even though there are some positive trend in some countries we also note that there is some disruptive role of certain social religious structures that are also uh uh uh constraining the the process but of all it's a lack of effective decentralization and empowerment of local of local structure there is a lot of talk but very few work to the talk but these growing number of successful cases have prompted the some government uh uh to develop national strategy mentioned already by uh uh uh Ben to promote and to guide the outgrowth forestry development and I think uh uh in relation to Kenya Niger is leading the park but similar cases can be found in Senegal Tanzania and HOP are just to name few the third and final element refer to what uh Andrew you were mentioning about the green green uh great green world which is indeed a political commitment across border to provide a broader framework for the promotion of a multi sectoral multi-stake order and multi-disciplinary approach to sustainable land management and land and natural resources management at this landscape scale planning intervention includes sustainable forest management forest landscape restoration agroforestry and farmer managed natural regenerations despite the initial skepticism the initiative is gaining some momentum and impetus national and regional management structure has been put in place with the support of some agency such as a FAO and other partners national strategy and action plan has been developed and international collaboration also is uh trying to harmonize uh its uh its its its contributions this the challenge are has great has the promises the main issue are the limited scientific and technical capability and financial base of the initiative second it the narrow agricultural boundaries set uh for the initiative at the onset it's just 15 kilometers and uh there is a need for greater coordination among the external partners and among the African regional and sub-regional entities but there is a high hope that this barrier will be unlocked very soon thank you thank you very much Mokhtar and thanks for driving home the points around ownership and governance and some of the constraints we face but also the opportunity that the great green wall holds for us to show the political will across national boundaries thank you very much now may i invite robert to give us a few insights probably related to research thank you thank you constance um i think all the panelists uh who already talk have clearly shown that africa has developed skills in adaptation and the regreening of a sale have been several times uh mentioned it's not only in niger because today we have some significant cases in bukina in mali that shows clearly the regreening of a sahel and i would like to tap on this to show what can be the importance of research in terms of uh accompanying this initiative in order to ensure a sustainable let's say a climate smart options uh that can be upscaled across the whole region but before that let me recall a little bit uh that this is an initiative this that is clearly farm alert innovation it's a farm alert innovation and this is the reason why we don't talk too much about research there and it is important to explore this uh this component of of the initiative so this basically this initiative has consisted in protecting uh the different uh trees that appeared in the farm uh land and it is selected according to the needs and the objective of the farmer and this has allowed increasing the availability of water uh to people to crop to livestock and even to trees and this has also increased crop production and food security for a growing population uh as andrew mentioned 500 000 ton per year of crop of production uh that have happened in niger so the evidence is there but we have to agree that indeed the research component came later in order to investigate what happened and also to try uh document a little bit then i will emphasize on this aspect what can be the role of research in my viewpoint the first thing is that research should try to document clearly in a scientific manner in a more comprehensive way all these kind of initiatives that are working and that are farmer based and we have to clearly uh determine what are the reasons for the successful impact biophysical biophysical uh factors socio-economical factors these are very crucial in the perspective of the upscaling of these practices researchers should also try to determine the condition for sustaining these practices and taking into consideration the dimension of climate change that is happening i think the condition of success of these practices so there are also some opportunities and the potential for carbon sequestration for instance regarding this uh farmer managed tree regeneration is not yet known so it's important that research try to investigate on this aspect in order to develop some tools that will help and inform the decision making for the national decision makers we have to also continue developing options that are climate smart that are climate smart and as Andrew mentioned it should be the the the triple win that will guide our intervention with these kind of options i'm talking about and it should integrate crops and trees it should not be uh agricultural in one part and uh forestry and in another this is over and we have to as i said we have to suggest tools and measures that will allow improving the resilience while contributing to the mitigation of climate change and the preservation of biodiversity and again we have to explore and develop some agro forestry options that will increase the soil carbon and think about the enrichment of parklands because we are in a very severe environment very harsh conditions and it is important to bring some new parameters that will increase the potential of productivity of these environment and it's important that we as scientists and researchers we think about enriching these parklands free bringing in some new genetic materials and so on and these are the things we have to think about if we would like to sustain this kind of successful practices that are really helpful in term of attaining the food security thank you very much thank you very much robert and also bringing in the multiple ecosystem processes and this evidence base that is going to be required to show the value that we can make a change all right ladies and gentlemen we've heard from four wonderful actors and right now we have to do about 35 minutes worth of work in about 15 so i think we're going to fast forward here and start to hear what's bubbling up in your minds first of all um can i use this mic down here okay it's time for us quickly to register who's in the room so if you're down here you have access to one of these please pick it up and let me read to you the one question so our panelists know who they're talking to who they're going to be discussing with choose the option that best characterizes the organization that you represent today at forest day private sector NGO government international organization academic research or other you have 10 seconds how did we do all right we've got some academics in the room and also a solid contingent of NGOs that's fantastic so we have a nice distribution of our audience so now let me ask you because we're going to try and get as much information out of you as possible so that our panelists can come back to you i'd like you to turn to the closest person to you and share one insight one reaction that you have to the four speakers that you've just heard from you've got one minute so share an insight quickly what struck you you're going to give me one great thank you so much all right has everybody got their insight sorted or a question or a concern all right we've got a runner on both sides and let's take three reactions or comments to our colleagues we're going to start here we're going to come here next is there a third one in the wings all right let's start here please introduce yourself yeah uh yes thank you my name is marco aho i come from finland i discussed with my neighbor here and we identified that one of the burning maybe the most burning issue is not the technical one because there are technical solutions but it's a governance issue um the the african population will double pretty soon and right now to my understanding the 70 percent of african rural farmers are women that because the number of female farmers in the african environment will double it becomes a even more pressing governance issue to have a gender specific approach to to dissemination of technologies and empowering empowering the rural communities like the panelists have already indicated the problem is not that the farmers would not know how to to work on land and how to integrate trees uh and other woody plants to farming systems it becomes more urgently a governance issue to for to address the most pressing needs thank you very much marco please sir thank you very much i'm african i come from france and i both academy can so i i'm a question and a burning remark uh i think that all of you have not insisted enough of putting the agriculture in red plus and uh uh they all all of you say that agriculture should be in but what are you really doing to have it in and you told me you told us that there is still resistance about putting agriculture in red plus so you should explain a little bit more why there are resistance and what you are doing to overcome these resistance because that's very important we have been starting you know it's a fifth day for forest day and we have insisted to have a agricultural day and we only started in Copenhagen we should have done it five years earlier and so you should food the foresters are still thinking in what it's just about trees are about getting at the people and food so you it's time to come back to the real situation and it's it's possible now there's a there's a letter which is to be is going to be sent to the to the cop to incorporate agriculture and if you are not trying hard enough it will not be done so it's your responsibility okay thank you very much one more question yes could we have a mic here please thank you my name is tomas eifert from university of africa i think we as scientists and i dare to speak for my fellow scientists as well is uh that we have failed in putting the level in between the grassroots results of scientific level and the policy level and this is the regional planning level we don't make that results visible to planners and to decision makers so we need a more holistic landscape management we need to have decision support tools that boil down the information to an essence that can be understood by a decision maker and we have to feed that tools with all our results that we gather in the next years and we that are already gathered so that is just a comment that i wanted to point out here very kind i think you might have some researchers that are with you on that okay let's hear from our panelists the first query was around really getting at this governance and gender and moktara you mentioned it specifically do you want to come back on that or does someone else want to add go ahead moktara hit it hard thank you yes i mean i i think we are really um giving lip services to the issue of of gender um even though we have evidence on the ground that women are really coming up and taking a much bigger and stronger role in the revival process as i mentioned and this is not just specific to to the rural areas i think in all segment of our society women are coming up but unfortunately it is not supported by by effective and and strong policy and political commitment in reality it is happening by itself indeed in some places you can see some instrument put in place but really looking at the global picture throughout the continent it is not supported by commitments thank you very much moktara andrew can i ask you to speak to how we're going to fast track this agriculture piece well you raise a very good question number one what why is there resistance to it um well you remember pre the barley cop there was a lot of resistance to forests as well and the whole red agenda and the argument went sort of it's too complicated i mean my goodness me it's difficult enough to do all the other things what about baselines the counterfactuals how do you measure it whole range of issues that was four years ago now um and i think due to a huge amount of work we're now we've made huge progress and we're not there yet but uh but i think the battle has largely been won what's the problem now with agriculture well partly the same there's a there's a view of this is just too complicated um and how do we measure carbon in the soil and all this kind of thing and how good you have millions and millions of farmers how would you ever sort of you know and so on and there's too quickly a link to carbon markets i don't know why i mean carbon markets could eventually relate to this but that's not really what it's about the main criticism is is this it is a fear on the part of some g 77 countries particularly agricultural exporting countries they fear that um that down the road if agriculture is fully included including the emissions side of the equation then down the road there could be some sort of limits put on certain agricultural techniques um and maybe even trade sanctions put on and so on and so that's the criticism now um is that a good criticism no but you can understand why it's there um what are we doing about it well um the south africans as you know are major proponents of change tina joma paterson the minister of agriculture here is obsessive about this in a very wonderful way um we worked with her to convene a meeting of agricultural ministers from throughout africa uh in in september that led immediately that meeting we then flew to bamako um where there was the meeting of amsen all the environment ministers of africa some of us there brought the delegate the uh the declaration including minister malayua who's the minister of environment from south africa she went and gave an impassioned statement presented the declaration that came from the ministers of agriculture here and the ministers of environment there from africa actually said well this sort of makes sense we're sort of on your side but interestingly when it gets down then to the negotiators they very quickly say well it's i don't think so not this year i mean it's just too it's too difficult we've got so much else on our plate i mean there's the Kyoto protocol i mean there's the green fund i mean we just can't give the airtime that this would deserve and then you also have some who are really actively opposing it for some of the reasons that i said so you know what are we doing we're just one small player one of the things that we're doing on wednesday we're convening a meeting um kofi anand is flying here for one purpose only to argue on this point he's coming for four hours and he is coming on the issue of of agriculture um president zuma will be there prime minister mellis will be there um a whole range of of of uh of leading speakers uh will be there mary robinson will be there joseph sheeran will be there all making the case as clearly as they possibly can that this needs to take place but there's still a lot to play for there's still five more days on this cop and this the being africa's cop is the time to really make progress what one's wanting is not very much quite frankly one wants a work program under subster one wants it to be recognized in a holistic way and not just under adaptation so um so let's see but it i mean you put the challenge on me you somehow said it was our job well we're working as hard as we possibly can we're also convening some some uh some negotiators last night there was a dinner for all um negotiator champions on this subject to try and move it forward but i also put it back to this community you are the experts you bring science to this you your voice is credible get in there and lobby thank you very much there's everything to play for okay please ben you run a research institute you want to just give me one second and tell me how do you get these messages to the policymakers yeah thank you very much i think one of the things that comes out very clear is the aspect you are talking about the science policy interface and one of the things we do is that in science we just general uh generate a lot of technological information which does not really make sense to our policymakers we ought and need to simplify we need to actually come up with very clear messages that can be able to influence policy because policy want to get really the outputs on exactly how this can be able to do rather than the actual science jacquon that we generate so simplifying and generating messages that can be accepted and policy messages will actually be able to uh cover the cup between the science that we generate as well as you know the messages the policies would be able to so the aspect of packaging information generation and packaging and knowledge management is an important aspect that we need to be able to look at if of course you know this going to influence policy robert do you have a something you'd like to add to that from the ccaps experience yes uh just to emphasize that this is really a key challenge for scientists how to bring and translate the scientific results in such a language that the policymakers can use it easily this is really a key challenge and we are always talking about mainstreaming climate change into development plans and so on and so forth but how to do it we never talk about that and i think it is important that we develop some tools in and this is research we have to develop some tools that that really help know what is the process that should really bring the scientific results to the decision makers thank you very much robert okay i'm going to invite us to answer a few more questions i saw a couple of hands coming up but we've got to do this this is part of our homework so can we have the set of questions please um right dry land forests are part of climate smart agriculture perhaps what is the most important change needed to take climate smart agriculture to scale is it more financing more information more coordination among government agencies or is it better policies you only get one choice and vote now please all right better policies is the winner but we also need coordination among government agencies what i and nobody's gonna say we don't need financing i'm pretty sure so we have some on each of these but what i saw was people didn't have they didn't want to choose among them we might need more than just one or the other all right let's go to the next question oh this is how we look all right we're fairly evenly distributed among our questions among our stakeholders excellent shall we go to the next question given experiences in your country how would you rate the importance of devolving control over natural resources to local people as a way to involve improve woodland management in a way which builds resilience to climate shocks is it very important is it just important is it not important or i'm not sure all right very important there seems to be some pretty strong agreement about the resilience side of the woodland management thank you very much and let's see how we did i think we should work together okay let's go to the next question now assuming that the rights to woodland resources are clearly defined which of the following would be the best way to involve the private sector in improving woodland management and landscape restoration in partnership with forest departments or other government institutions in partnership with community-based institutions in partnership with individuals any of one two or three they're giving us some spread there and lastly the private sector is not an appropriate partner please vote all right so we think that it's in partnership one way or the other um and that with community institutions or among individuals government institutions and community institutions there are a few of us that feel like private sector just shouldn't show up at this particular table do we see the distribution okay all right we've got lots of coffee talk to happen all right let's go to the last question we've been talking about investments and the need for financing so which of the following climate investments would most effectively promote adaptation for example by improving household food security in dry woodlands should we improve access to markets and facilitate private investment should we improve access to technical assistance on integrating trees into our farming systems shall we institute a system of payments for environmental services for carbon or implement appropriate tenure policy reform please vote okay so we have a bit of a balance between improving access to our technical assistance to get those trees on farms and sorting out our tenure issues and of course we still think markets and payment for environmental services or rewards are important we've got two quick questions we're going to register I saw David and then I saw Amos and then we're going to come back and invite the panelists to make final remarks thank you David Hart from University Leeds United Kingdom I think it's also important we get agriculture in in COP but it's also looking multi-track processes are getting more investment in climate smart agriculture and forestry outside because we need much more investment we can get out of climate financing so it was a question towards Andrew but it's just say we need to get more investment full stop in better agriculture and better forestry as well as a decision in in this COP okay thank you David can we take this question here okay what I've seen like in Kenya on in agroforestry what starts is like a policy and not research because the landscapes we are talking about the landscape we have destroyed so it's a matter of reversing those landscapes back not having new species like eucalyptus plantation in the landscapes which have been damaged so like to know the kind of research that is being done on the species in relation to landscape rehabilitation or resilience landscapes thank you very much all right even though I couldn't lure you down I've got um two questions up here we'll start here and go there and then we're gonna hear me there we go um I just like to suggest that maybe we can get over red plus a little bit and declare victory because the drivers of deforestation and agriculture is one of them is clearly included in red plus in the decision so I think we can sort of get past the fact that there's no explicit recognition of agriculture in red plus and and just take it as as we're in there because of the drivers and secondly I think that red plus is not the be all and end all of mitigation in agriculture 95 percent of the emissions from agriculture are the non-co2 greenhouse gases okay methane emission from enteric fermentation is number one nitrous oxide emission from fertilizers number two methane from rice is number three manure management produces the rest red is not going to solve that problem that's not the right mechanism for this so let's get the mechanisms right and figure out just what we want and I think if we can clearly articulate what it is we want to see in the work program we'll have we'll have the ears will be turned towards us and they'll start listening but as far as red you know let's take the the driver's part and and work on that and and clearly explain what we can do about being part of that and for the rest of the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture let's figure out what the right mechanism is for dealing with I just don't think red is that mechanism can you identify yourself quickly yeah my name is Lou Verso I'm from C4 thank you very much yes please uh Edmund Barrow from IUCN a couple of small little questions mainly to Andrew you talked about african knowing about adaptation and I'm going to provoke and generalize a bit how can we persuade african governments to know about adaptation in african drylands secondly um again you Andrew from the world bank and also Peter Dewey's from the world bank I was a bit surprised you didn't mention the ministry of finance or macroeconomic development because those are the people who actually write the checks and make policy or who are actually ultimately determine policy a present agriculture etc is a relatively important player the environment and the forests are relatively weak players how do we get them on a level playing field where we mute where we acknowledge the real importance of all those goods and services you talked about those 10 billion billion dollars thank you thank you very much Ed okay let's have a last round of comments from our very kind speakers you've just been given a lot more to think about because we had a set of questions where people made some um statements by voting but also then we had follow-up questions from relative to invest full stop ensuring that ag and forestry and development were all going in a good direction we had um additional questions around red additional questions around how do we make sure that the research is moving in the direction of resilience versus other ways of doing things and then lastly what about some of the other actors the minister of finance for example so Robert I'd like to start on your end and I'm asking I'm going to ask you to be as brief as humanly possible as they say brief is brilliant and so very short answers and we'll just move down the line and we'll ask Andrew to finish up because he got several of those questions very briefly for me there is no competition between scientists and farmers we are all researchers and farmers has the advantage to know better their the environment so I believe that we can always work together in order to come up with options that really are very useful for the main beneficiaries that are the farmers so this is very important thank you yes I do believe that priority attention should be given to investing into people and their institutions I think the example that has been shown from the Sahel starting from the initial cases shows the way forward indeed we need more attention and more contribution from from science and technology but I think institutions and people deserve priority attention indeed opening up the area of role of other government institution I think is also important not just ministers of agriculture or environment but I think cross cutting approach in involving indeed ministers of finance is important also thank you thank you so much Mokhtar Ben please yes I can be able to say that on my part the aspect of institutional strengthening is a very important one but to respond to the question that had been actually asked in terms of research we have quite a lot that has been done what I would rather recommend is that let us build on the lessons learned because it's out of these particular lessons learned that you shall be able to pick the best practices and use these particular practices for purpose of scaling up and in that way we shall be moving in the right direction build on what we know okay Andrew you've got a few things to address please well Ben and I were together doing shadow voting on all of those same ones and we agree with the majority actually so you're right at least we think you are but the striking thing was exactly what what you said which is how all all segments sort of were shared equally I mean it wasn't like researchers are saying this international institutions NGOs it was and which is actually very very encouraging I thought I really want to agree with David's premise I mean David said hey it's not just all about climate finance what about regular finance that's absolutely and utterly right the plain fact of the matter is though that even an institution like the World Bank and I think we probably provide more outside of climate finance we provide more financing for forests than any other institution but it's only about 300 million dollars a year and that's like 1% of our total financing worldwide now why is that the demand is actually not very great actually now obviously we tend to provide loans and so governments don't seem to think it's worth borrowing for this the other reason though is that quite frankly the experience of of forest programs has not been great they tend to be slower it's very hard to get to get them sort of really on track what I take from this and I mean I must say I found this totally great because not what I said but what you guys said there I'm sensing that we are making a lot of progress on learning things that work I mean all of you three said very very positive things about examples of things that actually are working so I'd make one other point David I think that climate finance has refreshed and excited the whole community whether that's fcpf or the FIP or UN red or whatever I think it's actually brought a lot of zip and it's brought a significant amount of additional resources the the really important thing is to use that limited climate finance to leverage a lot more finance that's what we're finding now is actually we're now providing more regular finance because there's climate finance I do want to agree with our friend up there from c4 I mean it's really a different whole set of issues but I would love to have a session on that but I don't want to go into detail but I like your point finally our friend from IUCN you know what are we doing to get ministers of finance on board it's absolutely vital I think as a community we have not managed to make it as I said at the very beginning to tell a persuasive narrative that relates to the economy and a sustainable economy over time I think we've made it sound too complicated and it is very complicated and what all around the world now I mean more than a hundred developing countries are saying look we're really interested in this green growth thing I mean the minister of finance of South Africa wonderful man Praveen Gordon he's always saying show me the jobs that are going to come out of this and I will become the greatest champion and I think what we need to do as a community is say hey actually dry land management management dry land forest are part of a green growth story that relates to livelihoods it relates to jobs it relates to really the core of development just as much as people that will be employed making solar panels say which is what everyone's talking about so I think the burden is on all of us to make this whole story sing and it seems to me that's what we're trying to do today thank you very much Andrew and can we give a round of applause to all of our speakers and this has been a very high powered session it's a disappointment when we can't drill down into some of these topics but some very serious things have been registered and so we greatly appreciate that but hope some informal conversations will follow it up may I invite Peter Deweese to please come up and close us out Peter Deweese from the World Bank thank you so much I it's a great pleasure to have been able to have host this session with a shared session with FAO and I'd like to close out by recognizing a few colleagues with FAO Sue Bratz and Nora Baramuni who have been really key in moving this agenda forward they've been tremendous and very helpful in doing that I'd also very much like to thank our wonderful panel Andrew, Ben, Robert and and and Mokhtar and of course Constance Neely as well as