 Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Ruwit. I'm very happy to be here to briefly share the experience of forest landscape restoration in Ethiopia. Our emphasis is mainly on looking at state-led initiatives with emphasis on their strengths and limitations. I will be giving you briefly a bit of background. We just got a little bit of information about it, then assess the status of forest landscape restoration initiatives. As I said, we are focusing on the strengths and limitations so that we could probably have a home tech message with regard to what needs to be addressed to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. I just wanted to show you because probably we are coming from Africa, from Eastern Ethiopia, I mean Eastern Africa region, so that you could locate where Ethiopia is. But I wanted to show you how diverse agroecological is a country is. It is the most mountainous country in Africa, so as you move on into looking at the opportunities and challenges, you'd really see the diversity in terms of agroecology as well as socio-economics status of the country. Most of the natural forests are in the south and southwest. Much of the participatory forest management that we are talking about would be on this side, but the central highlanders in Northern Ethiopia is where we have most of the rural population, where agriculture has been dominating and land has been degraded for centuries. And in this area, we talk about area exclosures and so that you could actually locate yourself. I thought this picture would really give so much meaning in terms of what is going on. And as you could see, it's not only rural population pressure, but you have a huge livestock population also. The largest livestock population in Africa is found in Ethiopia. And it's also an indication where you don't have really vegetation literally. Most of the plantations are around the homesteads and it actually implies also the issue of tenure. And as you could see, steep slopes are also cultivated. A very good indication that the country doesn't still have a very clear national land use plan and also definition of what forest is and what forest land is. Now, to just give a very general context, as I said earlier, Ethiopia is a mountainous country where the need for forest landscape restoration is critical. Still, it is a very rural society, over 80% of almost 100 million depend on agriculture. And highlanders have been cultivated for ages and as a result, they are severely degraded. We estimate more than three quarters of the highlanders are highly degraded. Agricultural expansion, be it commercial and smallholder, and also fuel extraction are the major drivers of deforestation and forest degradation respectively. But also being in the tropics, the climate change and the effects of climate variability has increased from the 1970s to the current. Now we really have one in ten years of drought has increased into more than three years of drought in ten years. In some cases you might even have one drought in every two, three years. As a result, the country has been engaged in soil and water conservation efforts and landscape rehabilitation way, way, way before the global world was paying attention to. Now, as an ancient country independent on agriculture, land degradation was there for centuries, so an attempt was made in the 1890s to introduce eucalyptus from Australia, which you have seen earlier. Up until the 1970s, what you see was the country is a feudalist system and forests were designated in the land use system as westlanders. So if you have a westland then you pay more taxes. So that was how the active conversion of forests into agriculture was promoted through policy. In 1975 Peter highlighted the nationalization of land and forests. It was kind of a revolution until then all land and forests belonged to the government. And again since 1995 we also follow a decentralized federal system which as you could imagine has a huge implication on forest governance. And since 2007 now we have a new law and the first policy where the rights of communities to manage forests is recognized but the details were not there. And in 2011 I think the country made this radical shift to become a carbon neutral country by 2030 and then forestry was identified as one of the pillars. I think since then now the policy makers are really paying attention to landscape rehabilitation and landscape. In 2013 now we have a separate ministry to facilitate these initiatives. In the current five year development plan we have really major, major goals to increase the contribution of forests to the national economy as well as to increase the forest cover. Now in doing so farmers have their own initiatives of growing trees here and there but there are two major initiatives that I would like to focus on. One is the participatory forest management that Peter was talking about and the other one is area exclosure that Dr. Muru will be talking about shortly. And these are actually state-led initiatives that we thought could highlight the experiences and challenges of ekepe in rehabilitating forest landscape areas and as you could imagine knowingly or unknowingly the country has committed in one of the largest commitments in bone challenge 15 million and the assumption behind was that the government will mobilize millions of households to do the rehabilitation work and the international community will be backstopping it. So this 15 million hectare is generally assumed by government authorities as possible to be achieved through mobilization of millions of households. Over the last probably a couple of years the government is mobilizing rural households to actually contribute up to 30 to 40 Mondays of free labor for landscape rehabilitation annually. Tree planting is going on now but as we have noted these tree planting initiatives are very often done on communal land and our assessment shows that the results were not impressive. But on the other hand as you could see these are also farmers own initiative of tree planting with no government support at all but very effective and also very successful as I will come back again. As I told you there is an ambitious plan of the government on the next five years and much of this is supposed to be achieved through landscape restoration efforts by engaging communities and all others. Now our study focus that actually looking at what experience do we have what can we learn and what can we suggest to improve effectiveness and efficiency and we wanted also to identify improvement measures to improve the conservation as well as livelihood outcomes of these restoration objectives that Dr. Muru would be talking about shortly. As I said by looking at the national experience on participatory forest management which Peter was actually talking about based on a case study from our national review we used certain indicators which we thought are necessary to ensure that participatory forest management contributes to conservation as well as livelihood objectives. Based on a number of criteria we have assessed experiences all over the country and we concluded that PFM was energy driven and the involvement of the government was low. Still even if it has started in the mid 1990s the government hasn't actually fully owned the process even if it is in the policy document that it would be the major vehicle to put much of the natural forest under improved participatory forest management. Assessment shows that there is a better forest outcome but we are worried that there are leakage here and there that hasn't been reported because NGOs tend to report on forest patches that they have been actually involved in. Both the experts and community members believe that the conservation gains are meaningful and appreciated but economic gains are much much below their expectations. So we concluded that in a forest under PFM the productivity level is low, the management is very restricted as a result the economic benefits that communities could gain remain very low. And one of the reasons that we thought as a very serious limitation was suboptimal community participation. While the communities are engaged and involved but their voices in terms of what to generate from forest was dictated by the forestry experts as the initial objective was reducing deforestation not increasing income of farmer households. On the other hand, be it at the experts level but also at the community level there is an institutional as well as human resource capacity limitation to negotiate with the government to develop a meaningful plan and to optimize between conservation and development goals. We also noted that there has generally been a weak follow up and takeover of PFM projects by the government and overall in the project management cycle of participatory forest management. As a result, we are worried that the sustainability of participatory forest management project in forest under PFM is questioned due to economic incentives. The whole issue of tenure that Peter talked about now this is an example now let me go to the area exclosures I think the term is about setting aside a designated degraded landscape to allow it to rehabilitate and to come back to more productive stage in terms of mainly for forestry objective. So there is no cutting of trees, cultivation, grazing etc. so a kind of a management type and by laws that should be agreed upon and this is considered generally by the government as a successful experience and this is the one that is going to be used to achieve the 15 million hectare target set by the government but again our knowledge on the process establishment and management as well as outcome of area exclosures was limited and we are engaged in actually identifying effective practices, limitations and challenges to sustainability so team of experts sat down nationally identified procedures, criteria indicators and evaluated area exclosures experiences mainly in northern India. So the study concluded that area exclosures unlike PFM was mainly government driven the involvement of NGOs was limited and again good ecological outcomes but very poor productivity and economic gains suboptimal community participation much of the cost is still borne by the communities and incentive mechanisms for communities remain limited and under developed institutional capacity is still there so again sustainability is questioned by tenured security and weak incentives so these are examples where community mobilization in terms of soil and water conservation you could really imagine the number of Mondays put behind to restore these lands so these are the changes you could see other challenges have to do with population pressure landlessness, ambitious targets for agriculture as well as forestry but very limited capacity at the landscape level as well as at the institutional level to make the trade-offs between development and conservation objectives neglecting farmers own initiatives in landscape rehabilitation we saw it as a challenge and there is little experience actually little evidence to show that international experience and knowledge is embedded into the planning of these initiatives the shared strength is high level commitment community mobilization investment by the community encouraging conservation outcomes boundaries are socially fenced and government continues to assist in both cases even though the engagement of the government in both virus the limitations are same I talked about again we need to make sure that community involvement is maximized so that they could really be given the opportunity to negotiate objectives and management plans tenure security should be ensured productivity must be increased as a conclusion Ethiopia is engaged in major FLR activities these two area exposure and participatory forest management are the two that the government is counting on to achieve the 22 million hectare of forest land scaper rehabilitation by 2025 but sustainability is questioned because of poverty and landlessness but also suboptimal participation of communities mainly focus on conservation less on economic gains and tenure insecurity and little unclear forms of net beneficiary mechanisms as well as in weak institutional as well as human resource capacity to plan, monitor and devaluate so addressing these challenges we hope will make FLR initiatives in Ethiopia much more rewarding to communities and also much more sustainable locally and by so doing we hope that the country could also contribute to the global climate change mitigation efforts I thank you