 Hello and welcome to the World Environment Day screening of and discussion on the inspiring and critically acclaimed documentary film, Kiss the Ground, which features and examines a very simple solution to climate change. My name is Tom Pesik and I'm a senior liaison officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization's liaison office for North America based in Washington DC. And I have the pleasure of serving as moderator of our event today. Today's webinar is co-hosted by the North America offices of FAO and UNEP in collaboration with Kiss the Ground. The event is intended to raise awareness and to rally action around the newly launched UN decade on ecosystem restoration, which aims to prevent halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean. We have a very exciting program for you today, but before we start, there are a few important housekeeping items I would like to cover. Personally, I would like to advise you that this event is being recorded and that it is also being live streamed on Twitter at FAO North America. A recording of this webinar will be shared with all participants afterwards. Please join the conversation on Twitter by using hashtag generation restoration. Please feel free to let us know who you are and from where you're joining us in the Zoom chat box. Please use the Zoom Q&A box to pose your questions stating your name and affiliation, if any, and to whom your question is directed. I will not be able to make full and proper introductions for our distinguished speakers due to time constraints. However, their full biographies will be made available to you in the Zoom chat box. Lastly, I would like to provide a brief outline of how our event will be structured. In a moment, we will hear an inspiring World Environment Day message from Jordan Sanchez, which really captures the essence of why we're all gathered here today. We will then hear welcoming remarks from both UNEP and FAO. This will be followed by a preview of the documentary film Kiss the Ground and a conversation with Finnean Makepeace co-founder of Kiss the Ground. Thereafter, we will have a panel discussion with experts from FAO and a featured guest from the film itself. And then we will transition to the Q&A portion of the program, at which time I will begin posing questions from you, the audience, to our speakers based upon your entries in the Zoom Q&A box. And we will endeavor to end the session promptly at 12pm Eastern Standard Time. I now invite you to enjoy the following World Environment Day message from Jordan Sanchez. Have you ever seen Time Fly? Watch it slip through your fingers like a cloud passing by. Too slow to notice it weaving. Too fast to make it stop. All we've known is to destroy like it's breathing. The pitter-patter of rain drops match the sounds of clocks counting down. Tick. How lucky we are to live. We are a fraction of a second in Earth's lifetime. Yet she is our only lifeline. Resilient, we stand on our own two feet. I'll tell you, reimagining the future has never tasted so sweet. Like nectar to a bee, honey to a home. No one can do this alone. Sick. The promise of restoration lives within us. We see her in the hues of the youth. But if you're just asking you, what will you stand for? Now is the time for our regeneration. It is now my pleasure to introduce Barbara Hendry, the Regional Director for the UN Environment Program's North America office, who will provide welcoming remarks on behalf of UNEP. Barbara the floor is yours. Thank you so much Thomas. let me just say that I'm absolutely thrilled to be here on behalf of UNEP in recognition of World Environment Day and for this special screening and discussion of the quite remarkable film, Kiss the Ground. Just for those of you who don't necessarily know us well, the UN Environment Program is the lead agency within the UN system on the environment. Among other things, we're responsible for promoting and monitoring implementation of the environmental facing parts of the Sustainable Development Goal Framework, agreed by all the member states of the United Nations in 2015. We also convene the UN Environment Assembly, which is a gathering of the world's environment ministers every two years who set the global agenda for environmental action. And we host World Environment Day, which has been celebrated every year since 1974 on the 5th of June, this past Saturday. This year's World Environment Day also marks the formal launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is co-led by the UN Environment Program and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. This decade is really a rallying cry to reimagine, recreate, and restore ecosystems across the planet. We have been very busy exploiting and destroying our planet's ecosystems, so our farmlands, our forests, our savannas, our mountains, our fresh waters, and our oceans. The world's ecosystems are almost on the verge of collapse, and they desperately need our help. For example, every three seconds, every three seconds, the world loses enough for us to cover a football field. And over the last century, we've destroyed around half of our natural wetlands. By restoring our ecosystems, we can improve our own condition. We can have better air, purer water, less extreme weather events, and better human health. And guess what? Nature in all of its diversity traps carbon. By restoring nature and stopping the loss of our precious global biodiversity, we are fighting climate change. UNEP and FAO are working together through the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration to help build a movement across all countries to reverse the destruction of our global ecosystems. The good news is that nature recovers. It's resilient if it's given half a chance. So for example, UNEP is supporting the Great Green Wall Initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is bringing life back to around 8,000 kilometers of degraded and desertified land. And in the process, it's boosting the livelihoods of millions of people living in that region. This and many other initiatives show what is perfectly possible to achieve with a bit of political will and investment. Kiss the ground also shows what is possible to achieve. It's so simple but so powerful. It's possible to farm in a different way that regenerates the soil, produces better yields, and helps trap carbon to fight climate change. It's the perfect example of the kind of change we need. We hope that you will continue to join us in encouraging worldwide awareness and action to revive and protect our precious ecosystems. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Barbara. I now have the great pleasure to introduce the newest member of our team, Jocelyn Brown Hall, who is the incoming director of FAO North America. Jocelyn will deliver welcoming remarks on behalf of FAO. And before she joins us in Washington, D.C., Jocelyn has served as the deputy regional representative for the FAO Regional Office for Africa in Ghana for the past several years. Jocelyn, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Tom and Barbara. I really am delighted to be here and note already in the chat how many different countries are represented here. I think we have people from Kenya and India and Mexico already on. This is an exciting opportunity. FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization is pleased to be co-hosting this timely World Environment Day screening webinar of Kiss the Ground with you on the occasion of UNEP's 50th anniversary. The Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, as we call it, for those of you who don't aren't familiar with it, is a specialized agency of the United Nations, one of the oldest specialized agencies. And we lead international efforts to defeat hunger and poverty. We are on the ground in 130 countries working to improve agriculture, fisheries, and forestry practices. And everything that goes with that, whether it's resilience, women and youth, agribusiness, private sector, world development, and everything in between. There's never been a more urgent need to revive damaged ecosystems than now. We've heard from Barbara the enormous toll that we're taking on our world's environment right now. And to add to some of those details that are sobering, agriculture accounts for 70% of the freshwater withdrawals globally, meaning, meanwhile an estimated two-thirds of the water regulating forests worldwide are degraded. 95% of our food is grown on soils, but one-third of our global soils are degraded. And something I've learned from my colleague here Eduardo Montsour, that where food insecurity is the greatest on the continent of Africa, our soils are actually need the most replenishment. Food production utilizes over 50% of the earth's habitable land, and one-third of this land is degraded. And there's increasing pressure on natural resources affecting the well-being of 3.2 billion people, almost half the 40% of the world's global population are more fueling poverty and food insecurity. The problem is enormous, and sometimes we can get lost in our problems, but we here in FAO working with UNEP and throughout the United Nations, we are also focused on solutions. And the decade, this decade could not have come sooner. Kiss the ground could not be more clear about the opportunities and hope for regenerative agriculture, nature-based solutions, and a whole suite of actions we can keep to take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into our soils. The UN decade of ecosystems restoration, which runs from 2021 to 2030, aims to ramp up restoration and put the world on track for sustainable future by building a global movement to increase political will at all relevant levels. Ecosystem restoration is one of the most important ways of delivering nature-based solutions for food insecurity, climate change, mitigation, and adaptation, and biodiversity loss. It won't be easier quick, and it will take significant changes to how we are currently operating, but the beauty of ecosystem restoration is that it can happen at any scale and that everyone has a role to play. Specifically in FAO, we are tracking progress of efforts to restore degraded ecosystems on an unprecedented scale by developing an operational monitoring and reporting framework for the decade with partners building on existing international, regional, and national reporting processes. We are also working with the international community to develop indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals or STGs designed to ensure the sustainability of land and water resources. For those of you who might be SDG wonks, we're specifically focusing on SDG2 indicator 2.4.1, 15.3.1, and 6.4.1 and 6.4.2, and there will not be a test about those indicators at the end of this session. We've also been gearing up on the UN Food Systems Summit, which will launch bold new actions to deliver progress on all 17 SDGs, each of which relies to some degree on healthier, more sustainable, and equitable food systems. Everybody can do his or her part, whether it be trying not to degrade the land any farther, implementing programs, reducing food loss and waste. There's a whole host of ways that we can work on this together. And I thank you for joining us today on this very important discussion. And I hope, coupled with this documentary, that you're energized to take bold actions toward healing our planet. Thank you very much, Tom. Over to you. Thanks so much, Jocelyn. And again, Barbara, for those terrific welcoming remarks, which I think serve as an excellent basis for our discussion here today on a new era of ecosystem restoration. Now, getting back to the film, narrated and featuring the passionate and always entertaining Rudy Harrelson, Kiss the Ground is an inspiring and groundbreaking film that reveals the first viable solution to our climate crisis. Kiss the Ground reveals that by regenerating the world's soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth's climate, restore lost ecosystems, and create abundant food supplies. Using compelling graphics and visuals, along with striking NASA and NOVA footage, the film artfully illustrates how, by drawing down atmospheric carbon, soil is the missing piece of the climate puzzle. This movie is positioned to catalyze a movement to accomplish the impossible, to solve humanity's greatest challenge, to balance the climate, and secure our species future. It is now my great pleasure to cue a preview of Kiss the Ground. So much bad news about our planet. It's so warm. The truth is, I've given up. This is the story of a simple solution, a way to heal our planet. The solution is right under our feet, and it's as old as dirt. All of our soils that are under chemical, conventional agriculture are almost completely devoid of microorganisms. Modern agriculture was not designed for the betterment of the soil. Fossil fuels are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. When we damage soils, carbon goes back to the atmosphere. And when we destroy soil, it releases carbon dioxide. Bio-sequestration is using plants, trees, and techniques of grazing and farming to capture carbon and store it in the soil. We can fix a lot of our climate issues to be bring the CO2 down into a living plant and put it back into the soil where it belongs. Plants working with soil microorganisms, it seems too simple. Healthy soils lead to a healthy plant, healthy plant, healthy human, healthy climate. There could be a way to eat food that heals the planet. The problem isn't the animal. The problem is where the animals are at. How do we take waste and repurpose and reuse it because it's really not waste? The poop has to stay in the loop. Compost is just one of a suite of soil-based carbon capture solutions. We know how to do it, and if we continue to scale over 30 years, we can reverse global running. We can get the earth back to the Garden of Eden that it once was by regeneration. To see biodiversity return to a place that was completely devastated, that gives me hope. Our health and the health of our plants are connected. If you look over here, my neighbor's land that has been chemical fallow, then you look over at our paddock. You have a diversity of different plant species. Which model do you want your food to be produced from? The answer is pretty simple to me. I'll make you a deal. I won't give up and neither shoot you. One of the members of our audience just asked the question whether we were going to watch the entire 84-minute film right now. Unfortunately, not. That was just the flavor of what you'll see if you do watch the entire film, which you can still do until midnight tonight. We now have the very good fortune of having with us a very special guest, Finnean Makepeace. Finnean has been intimately involved in the production of the documentary, and more broadly, in awakening people to the possibilities of regeneration. Finnean is the co-founder, policy director, and lead educator of the nonprofit Kiss the Ground. Finnean will now share with us the journey behind the movie and the organization in building a movement around regenerative agriculture. Finnean, over to you. Thank you so much, Tom. It's an honor to be here with everyone. Thank you all for watching the film over the weekend and all the amazing efforts that have gone into World Environment Day. I, for one, am so excited about the launch of the decade of ecosystem restoration. It's really, I think, a call to so many people out there that there's a new frontier on regeneration and restoration ahead of all of us. I want to just take it back before the film started. Kiss the Ground, the organization began probably similar to a lot of the folks on this call, a lot of people who are watching today with pretty simple basis. We didn't know. We had an aha moment. I had been an environmentalist my entire life, thought I knew most of what there was to know about climate change and where we were headed and where humanity was headed. What this idea that was then given to me from a gentleman named Graham Sate about soil's potential to not just pull down carbon and be this amazing carbon sink, but also as a means to have our land function again. We could rebuild its function. All of a sudden this opportunity was unmasked and it really has been the whole point behind Kiss the Ground. We said, well, we're not farmers. We're not scientists, but pretty sure we could probably help get the word out about this idea because we said, if we didn't know, probably a lot of people didn't know. Regenerative agriculture and this concept is, I want to make sure people are clear that so much of this is rooted in many indigenous cultures, mindset and ideologies. It also connects holistic management as well as cutting edge science. When we look into regenerative agriculture as this solution, it really requires all three of those pillars and is all three of those pillars. As someone who thought they knew, I was disconnected from some of this indigenous knowledge from my background. Our mission really, like Tom was saying, is awakening people to the possibilities of regeneration. We hope sincerely that this film has done that for you. The film began about a year and a half after the organization began, which was the organization about nine years ago, the film about seven years ago or so, but it was a long process. A lot of people involved. We liked everyone to know this is still just a part, a small portion of this regenerative agriculture, healthy soil, ecosystem restoration movement. It doesn't symbolize or equate everything. It is not it. We won't claim it is at all. There are so many stories that need to be told from all around the world of the heroes and the pioneers out there making this a reality, especially the indigenous cultures that are doing this and live this every day. Our motto is, together, we can do this, and it's going to take everyone, and it's really going to be about all of us getting involved. I'm going to share a few slides now, just to share some of the areas of my passion here with you all, and I'm not at the beginning of my slideshow, so we'll scroll through. So kiss the ground. Like I said, our mission is awakening people to the possibilities of regeneration, and we felt this responsibility to share, but what we really got was sustainability is not really an option, and I'm not trying to mess with the sustainable development goals here. I'm just saying that once we grasp where we're at and get the connection of where we can go, the opportunities really start to set into our mind when we live into the mindset of restoration and regeneration as a reliable possibility and grasp where we are. After 10,000 years and nearly all areas of the world, degradation, degeneration occurring, we have to come to grips with where we are and check into what is the most important option right now for humanity to grasp is regeneration. Then sustainability makes sense, so we say sustainability is just a little bit ahead of its time. Our soil is broken. It's not functioning. It's not working. So when we talk about this regeneration phenomenon, we're saying, wait, if we start sustaining now, that doesn't really work because everything doesn't work. The world is broken. We broke it. It's like a cup. A cup was designed to hold water. If you break it, it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Soil is the same way. It has a multitude of purposes to serve. When it's broken, it doesn't work. One of the key quotes that I use all the time is from Ray Archuleta, who's a star of the film. We didn't really know how the soil worked. Why this is so crucial is you have countless politicians, countless people who have been working in this field for a long time, countless people across the world that just didn't really get how the soil worked. And this is an opportunity. We shouldn't beat ourselves up about this. We should say this means there is so much that each of us can do now to contribute to this. And that's what gives me hope. Regenerative agriculture rebuilds soil. That's really important to remember is broken can be fixed. And the coolest news about this all is the problem is the solution. You got this in the film. The problem called too much CO2 in our atmosphere right now is what we need. We have to have that carbon to literally build back the structure of the soil. Are we going to have net carbon gain in our soil working with nature's amazing design, 500 million years of research and development it has? We can work with it or we can continue to have carbon loss. Plants share 30 to 40 percent of their liquid sugars into the soil. When we have a covered planet, we begin to have a healthy functioning planet. We can rebuild soil. We can take dirt and turn it into structured soil. It's mostly about maximizing solar energy function. This is what begins that regenerative feedback loop. Not just trying to keep what we have, sustain what we have. We're talking about starting from a diminished state. As you see with that arrow perpetually going out, that means we are allowing for a system to jump start itself. Here are some statistics from the star of the film, Gay Brown, looking at what can happen when we start restoring and regenerating earth. Here's our top 10 list. Reverse global warming. Take all that carbon up there, make it into soil. Reduce flooding and drought. Reduce fire hazards. Reduce toxic pesticides and fertilizers. Reduce dead zones and water pollution. Revive farmer prosperity. Replenish fresh water sources. Recreate regional access to nutrient dense food. Recover biodiversity and reconnect Indigenous knowledge. We have a choice. And on this launch of this decade, I'm so excited to bring so many partners, people who've been in this work for years and years. How do we all help to make this the call for our generation? And it's going to take more than just the usual suspects. We need so many people from tech to government all across college universities saying this is what my life is going to be about. We can all make the awareness of this such a phenomenon that the actions and outcomes do happen in this next decade. We have something called soil advocate training that will help anyone in the world do that. And we have ways that people can get involved to make sure that they can play the role that they want to play in this movement today. And we are working with most everyone in this group presenting today to help you do that. Together, we can do this. Thank you so much, Tom. And everyone here really appreciate being here. Excellent. Thank you very much, Finyan, for those remarks, which really reinforce the film's call for individuals to become more informed and to see the solutions right beneath their feet. Now for our panel discussion, we have three very highly distinguished guests to whom I will ask questions in turn, after which we will open it up for the Q&A session with the audience. And Finyan, we'd of course like to bring you back into the conversation at that point and certainly pose some questions to you. But first up for our panel discussion, it's my pleasure to welcome John D Lu, who is featured in the film. John is the ecosystem ambassador for the Kamala Foundation based in Amsterdam. And he is also the founder of the ecosystem restoration camps movement. His career spans several decades as a television producer and a cameraman, film producer, researcher, and ecologist. And over the years, he's produced, directed, written, and presented many critically acclaimed films, including Green Gold and Hope and a Changing Climate. John, thank you very much for being here with us today. To get us started, could you tell us a bit about how you first got involved in ecosystem restoration and perhaps also based upon your own very expensive experience, what it takes to make ecosystem restoration projects successful? Well, thank you very much, Tom. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I was a television journalist. I worked with CBS News, radio, television, Italiana, and Zeites Deutsches Fernsehen for many years when I was a young person. And I was covering big political and economic stories. But then the World Bank asked me to film a baseline study for the Lusplato Watershed Rehabilitation Project. And when I went there and I saw this, I was looking at a massively degraded landscape, which I knew was the cradle of Chinese civilization. And when I compared that to the contemporary political and economic news that I've been covering, which were like the rise of China from poverty and isolation and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I found that the ecology was more important because it's not simply about one historical period. It's about all of human civilization in the direction that human civilization is going. So that was the moment where I decided that I needed to understand this fully. And I realized that that would take the rest of my life and probably that's not enough. So that's what happened to me. Great. Thanks, John. And could you elaborate a bit? Tell us a bit about the ecosystem restoration camps movement and how people can get involved in that? Well, yeah. When I was studying ecology, I found that actually we can understand the basic systems that have evolved over evolutionary time and that they are constantly accumulative. So there's always more biodiversity, always more biomass, and always more accumulated organic matter when nature is functioning. And then I realized that human beings had valued materialism and abiotic systems, things that we extract and manufacture and buy and sell, higher than the ecological function. In fact, human beings had made the ecological function zero, which is just ridiculous. So when you realize that, then you understand that that creates a perverse incentive to degrade the ecosystems. And then I realized that what I was observing in the most successful restoration projects were that very simple people were working to restore biodiversity, biomass, and accumulated organic matter. And that this was more valuable than anything that human beings had ever made and everything that human beings will ever make. And so this suggested that there was some kind of illogical foundation for human civilization as it is today, and that the disparity that we see between the wealthy and the poor and those who are in power and those who are powerless is not real. And then I was worried because I was seeing we can restore large-scale degraded ecosystems, but how is that going to take place? Who's going to do this? And I realized that it's really only the ordinary people who do this. I also learned that the indigenous people have been basically on this path forever and that instead of having them lead us, they have been killed and their cultures suppressed. And all of these things that I started to wonder like how is this going to happen? I started to have dreams and I was waking up having this dream that people were going camping and they were getting up in the morning and they were growing soils and they were propagating and planting out and they were all having fun together. And I shook my head and I thought, well, nobody's going to do that. And then but I kept having that dream so I wrote about it and when I wrote about it then it started circulating and it was published in a couple of places and republished and then it was circulating and thousands and then tens of thousands of people said, well, that's a good idea. And some of them were saying, well, I'm having the same dream. And when that happened we said, well, let's create this movement of ecosystem restoration camps. And so the first year, the first camp was in Spain in the Altiplano and then the second year there was a second camp in Mexico and in the third year there were 21 camps and in the fourth year there were 37 camps and now we're headed in the fifth year to over 50 camps and I think the sky's the limit because how many camps you can have millions of camps all over the world because they're self-organizing, self-governing and autonomous. And there's just a network of all these camps spreading the information that's learned to everybody. So this is the fastest, the lowest cost and the most effective way to restore the earth and to shift human civilization away from focusing on materialism and a kind of casino mentality which has really, it's got a lot of corruption inside of it to this place where everyone is working in their own best interest but also in the interest of all living things and future generations of life and everyone is equal and sovereign and it's just a better way to live. Excellent. Thank you John. It's now my pleasure to introduce my FAO colleague Eduardo Montsour who serves as the director of the FAO office of climate change, biodiversity and environment and he's also the officer in charge of FAO's land and water division. Eduardo's career spans several decades in regions including Latin America, Africa and Asia. Eduardo, as we all know, World Environment Day just passed over the weekend on Saturday and it marked the official launch of the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. Could you tell us what this means and how this special push is intended to accelerate global action for ecosystem restoration? Thank you very much Tom. Dear colleagues, a great pleasure to be here with you today. Speaking from Rome, good morning for those in the west. We are over the hangover of the party let's say because the launch started on the falls with a gala event that had amazing moments including an interview of the executive director of UNEP with Jane Bodal which was an overwhelming for of us message from the Pope, message from the secretary general. It was a very overwhelming event followed by an event hosted by the government of Pakistan on the World Environment Day on the 5th Saturday that also had a number of very important commitments and we arrived today Monday the 7th with the responsibility of moving ahead with the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. You can see here in my background screen the logo that we are using for the decade which are the colors of the the SDGs the sustainable development goals that are related to the to the foundations of nature. A climate change, the SDG 13, the SDG 14 life on water, the SDG 15 life on land and represented by the human interaction with the red heart. So this is the symbol of the the the whole pack that was put together and this event that we are having today in this moment bring it and so what how we go about it and I think the the ground is a great starting point because we there are certain things that we learn throughout the time that first we we know that ecosystem restoration is important when this resolution passed in the General Assembly in 2019 in March 2019 it was proposed by El Salvador the the government of El Salvador it was immediately endorsed by more than 70 countries because it's difficult to say no we don't go for restoration. Restoration is important because system restoration is something that we have to do and we know how to do but we are not doing enough so it's not about a new thing that's going to go in parallel it's scaling up it's moving ahead and in terms of climate change Tom we know also that the most cost effective solution for addressing mitigation of carbon emission are related to nature are increasing stocks of carbon above ground but we haven't worked enough on increasing stocks of carbon below ground and what Finan just explained and the film shows so beautifully is the importance of first of all maintaining the carbon that exists on the ground which three times more than the carbon that exists in the atmosphere and also the capacity of this the the soils to serve as a sponge so for for and retain it we don't want the carbon that are in the soil to go to the atmosphere and that we have to recognize that bad agricultural practices are a major cause of carbon emission whenever you plow land there is carbon emission but there is a difference if if it's sustainably done if it's done with care the emissions can be 20 25 percent of the carbon comparing to 75 80 percent of the carbon on soil if it's not properly done so there are ways of using the land in in in a positive nature positive way that's what the UN food system uh food the UN food system summit uh called by the secretary general uh in September this year are gonna are gonna make it in one of its action tracks the the positive uh nature solutions that we're looking at uh my point is that we have not explored sufficiently the importance of carbon fixation in soils and the whole benefits that come together with sustainable soil management because it's not only about the climate it's tremendous impact on carbon on climate but it all has all the implications that will come together if we increase soil biodiversity if we include water retention if we include soil structure so well demonstrated in uh Finian slides um we we can regenerate the area that are currently being used basically what it means to them we don't need to cut one more tree to produce the food that we need now and in the future the planet has about 13 13.9 billion hectares of land and uh about 4.6 billion are currently used for food production from agriculture crops from livestock and uh as Joseline mentioned about one third is degraded and about one fourth of this one third one one fourth of the total is heavily degraded this is more than a billion I'm talking only about agricultural land I mean let's jump into that let's work on the regeneration and it doesn't mean planting trees of course planting trees is part of the process but it's returning these ecosystems that have been degraded into a healthy production systems so we are talking about agriculture has a role a role to play not as the enemy of the the nature conservation or the enemy of climate change fight but an ally if it's done properly because we can produce the food we want for now in the future for the what's the expectation that we're going to be 12 billion people by 2015 don't worry food is there we already have food for that we have to produce it in the same area that we are doing and that's possible if we apply principles of sustainable agriculture sustainable soil management regenerating these these areas that are already out there so uh what I would like to to to make sure is that uh uh we move with the UN decay as a joint movement putting together things that are already out there and things that have not been explored sufficiently in this moment restoration for instance uh for for increasing sustainable soil management can go a long way in protecting the environment increasing productivity of land restoring the land to its ecosystem services and in the decade we are not only talk about the land because it talks about all ecosystems wetlands marine coastal areas and marine ecosystems as well so we have to look at the whole set of opportunities that's there to get restoration to scale that's the main objective to raise it to scale and I close by inviting all of you uh I think we can help us putting again the website of the decade uh in the in the chat panel I invite all of you to look at it because there are ways to engage the engagement is individual uh we have to change habits towards more sustainability in our life in our daily practice we have to think in our work conditions especially if we work with agricultural sector how we can do it different way for thank you very much for putting the link to the website there in our working conditions how we are going to work for restoration of ecosystems and globally we will have three task forces that FAO is leading but these type forces are for every every interested institution to join we have one on best practices that has 150 partners already we have one on monitoring restoration because we have to show that this is working and if it's not working identify the reasons why and we and we have one task force also on financing restoration it's not going to be cheap but the benefits that you generate are fantastically rewarding and the word bank is currently leading the the the finance task force so I invite you to look at it at the website and to see what is your engagement and the engagement of your institution for all of us to have a successful UN decayed on ecosystem restoration 2021-2030 thank you Edward that was fantastic um I would now like to bring in our in-house soil expert Ronald Vargas who's the secretary of FAO's global soil partnership and Ronald has over 20 years of experience working on natural resource management for food security and ecosystem services Ronald the film discusses regenerative agriculture as a key solution to our climate challenges and building upon what what Eduardo has just said could you elaborate for us on what FAO is doing to promote healthy soils and more broadly the the integral role that soil can play in this effort thank you very much Tom and well a lot have been said already but I think it's very important to highlight some important point I believe that soil health has been always raised as an important issue by soil scientists since they are there for many years however we haven't given the the the weight that soil health requires and I will give you an example for instance in 1979 countries member countries under the FAO already signed the Wholesale Charter if you read that charter it is like if you are reading it now because the problems are exactly the same and I'm talking about 1979 and that's where countries and the UN and FAO particularly are urging action towards soil degradation climate change food insecurity etc and they are saying that we need to invest on soil health okay but then again many years later we keep talking about exactly the same issue one fundamental factor for not being responding and bringing attention to that topic is that before one consideration was that soil was only related to agriculture crop production and how to increase productivity but we didn't pay much attention to the other ecosystem services that were provided by soils and now of course became very evident and now we are all valuing them including carbon stocks okay because of climate change in 2011 we started trying to fill a gap because yes we have been always dealing with many natural resources but always soils was like left apart I don't know why maybe because it's so resilient that even if the graded keeps producing slow amounts but keep producing and I think that's the answer I can have for that however we started a sort of crusade to bring together people countries institutions scientists anybody who wanted to promote soil health and we established this global soil partnership in order to promote sustainable soil management and in there we focus a lot of our resources not much because soils do not receive that attention as I have been telling you and we invested in awareness raising and advocacy because that is fundamental to show general public politicians decision makers that investing on soils especially on soil health will bring many benefits not only for us but for our environment and for the future and that has been a work that we have been doing for 10 years 10 years later we are very glad because now soils are in the agenda okay I can tell you you can see the number of initiatives that are there this is good but they should catalyze on actions on the ground because we know how the science is there there is nothing new something important to mention is that during time we are very creative in creating paradigms frameworks new topics etc but if you see the root of them basically the science is basic is the same yes we need to maintain the soil protected cover rotations add organic matter those are principles that come from many different approaches that we knew in the past but now it's really the time to scale up investment on the ground in order to make a change and in there it is very important to mention something very important yes we need to restore remediate or if you want regenerate the graded soils but we also need to prevent further soil degradation and in the video in the in between of the two is management and what we promote is sustainable soil management we are not dogmatic but we want sustainable soil management and soil health and that's the work we are doing including carbon sequestration soil doctors because we want to follow soil health and we want to support the ones that can make the difference who are the small holders the small farmers who are abandoned they are alone and we cannot ask them to do all this work alone because they require investment so i hope we will join forces all together to really make a change thank you excellent thank you ronald that was that was very clear and compelling i'd now like to open the discussion to our audience and take some questions which have been entered into the the q and a box and elsewhere and if i may i'd like to start with you edwardo um and this first question comes from ed bourgeois and ed's question is how can regenerative agriculture have more of a seat at the table of the un food system summit thank you um i think i tackle a little bit uh it on the on the beginning please note that the the un food system summit is not an fao summit it's the secretary general summit that has been called to raise the importance of food systems at all levels so how can we have a better seat there are different action tracks as you know and they are led by the the government the the members of the un there are supporting units and particularly on the action track three i'm very happy to see my colleagues from the un ccd the the the convention on combating desertification as the lead ages to support the information that are there we are also participating of course i mentioned in the action track three because it's the one on providing positive nature solutions for for food systems so the the way to reach the summit we we we want the summit to be bold especially for the decisions that we'll carry after the summit that the to influence the way that we are going to work on our food systems afterwards and fao is going to do everything to support that uh the the the success of the summit also member countries are doing that like italy currently as the president of the g20 are organizing the pre-summit here in rome in the second quarter of july so this is a good momentum that we have to have with the the organizations and um and uh members member countries uh addressing the key issues that we think can make a difference for the food summit then there are the the different dialogues the national dialogues the independent dialogues or the basically these two types of dialogues that the summit or promotes and they are organized institutionally as in support of influence the summit because when you arrive at the summit which is a one-day big event we have to have the all the material ready for the decision and the follow-up most important is for the follow-up actions that will lead now it's up to us to every single one of us to put uh sustainable agriculture practices hike in the agenda link it with what we call now the agri-food systems the the not only the the consumption part but also the production part of our of our food uh if we link them together and work together on this i'm very confident that you have a great summit and a great follow-up ahead of us excellent thank you Eduardo i'd now like to pose a question to john and conscious of time i want to make sure that uh each of our speakers uh has a question to to respond to so briefly john in about a minute or so if you could uh earlier on you referenced repeatedly indigenous knowledge and culture and practices could you tell us a bit about what you think needs to be done differently uh or what more needs to be done to harness that knowledge uh that indigenous knowledge well i think first of all the indigenous knowledge has to be um has to be acknowledged so what what what has happened is that um there was a historical change in uh like regime change sort of because um indigenous people were suppressed and their cosmology and culture were were massively damaged and this has not been redressed and so this this has to be something that's on our minds and we have to think what was lost and what was lost is these are the cultures that were protecting the huge wonderful biodiverse parts of the world where the massive migrations of wild animals and the wonderful rainforests and and the huge savannahs were intact and now you have something based on agriculture and urban development and industry and and so on and this is not working out for us this is degrading the natural systems so going back and listening and and having a kind of reconciliation it's not so much about blame and retribution as it's about truth and reconciliation this is what's necessary is this cathartic uh compassion and understanding for what's happening and honoring the the the knowledge and the wisdom that they had and and learning from it thank you thank you john so before or rather after posing a question next to ronald and then to finney and i would i would then like to invite each of our our speakers to share with us in 30 seconds or so their key takeaway message for the audience if there's one thing the audience is to recall from what you've said today what would you like it to be so i flag that just just so you know i'll be turning to you shortly for those takeaways so now i'd like to pose a question to ronald and ronald if you could briefly in about a minute or so um respond to a question from marco galang which is how is the regenerative agriculture movement related to FAO's work and programs on global soils thank you yeah um i read that and is how it relates with the soil doctors program of power so basically um we have a program called rec soil which is the recarbonization of global soils and this for us is an a vehicle to move into investment for soil health okay carbon of course is the main target but we have witnessed that on the ground especially with the small farmers in developing countries one of the key weaknesses advisory extension services okay basically many countries they do not have access to technical support so and in order to want to change or aid these of course is not that we will bring extension services fully functional but we have one program that is called soil doctors which we learn from thailand which is very old they are very well working very well it means farmer to farmer technical uh no no technical sharing of knowledge okay so we train lead farmers who become soil doctors on understanding soil problems and soil solutions and then they start disseminating this in their communities okay so the soil doctors is a tool to uh share sustainable soil management practices but the similarity the the let's say the what is similar with uh this is the ground concept and regenerative concept is the rec soil the recarbonization and sustainable soil management by the way the kids the ground film is great and i think is one way of raising awareness and advocacy and i hope this can be one model to follow thanks well thank you very much ronald and now turning to you fenian i think i think it's fair to say that your career path has been anything but straight i understand that earlier on you were a successful touring musician before becoming someone who travels far and wide to teach people about soil and regenerative agriculture can you tell us very briefly why it's so important for more people to get involved in this effort perhaps drawing from your own experience and how you yourself got involved thank you so much uh tom and i just want to emphasize the work that ronald and others in this field have been up to for so many years i wasn't trying to discount that whatsoever in my statement saying that we didn't know people have been pushing this but when i say that i mean globally the phenomenon of humanity doesn't know indigenous cultures had so much knowledge of this that's been erased scientists have been yelling for years to to wake up there's a moment now where more people can know and what we found i guess the ground was like i said we we didn't know but we weren't farmers or scientists and we weren't expecting to be so but how could we help those people how could we be the champions and cheerleaders and frankly that's a role that literally everyone in the world can take part in being a champion and and causing this movement to move forward and so when we look at what can i do well i i was a touring musician as you said and i was an activist but i had not dedicated my life to a cause to making sure that it was going to be successful so there's room this is better than the dot com era folks this is happening it's getting going get in now get invested and make your life about this because together we can shift the needle if this remains with the usual suspects the folks on this call the people who've been in it for years it will not overcome the current trend of where we're going we are on a decline that's so rapid and scary that it's i don't even want to talk about it but unless we build this movement together with people who are new in it moving from industries saying oh i'm a tech leader i'm a business oh i know these people how do i help move the needle it's literally going to take millions of us to make sure we overcome the current trajectory and that's what i'm saying to everyone is you can take a huge part in this gay brown wasn't a farmer to sit with that for a second excellent thank you finnion edwardo over to you and in 30 i realized we're almost out of time here but in 30 seconds or less what's your key takeaway message for the audience today can it be a question i would like the the the key takeaway be a question that we can ask each one of us every morning when we start our working day what can i do to prevent and hold ecosystem degradation and promote restoration of the graded ecosystems if we ask this question every day in our starting work i think every one of us will contribute to it so my takeaway is keep the question thanks Eduardo i think it'll be it'll be difficult to top that but uh ronald over to you for your key takeaway message in 30 seconds or less thank you thomas uh well uh my take home message will be exactly that this is the time in which we can make a difference by really promoting soil health and ensuring that we will have healthy soils for healthy life for all this is the time because otherwise i'm telling you all this movement that was created will be for vain so let's make the best out of it and we need everyone especially people like finnion who changed from that topic to this so we are happy for that well done ronald john over to you i think we're at a turning point in human civilization and that the central intention of human civilization has got to be understanding the value of ecological function is higher than materialism and that the purpose of life is not to go shopping but that we have to treat everyone with a call equality and in doing that we're we're able to shift uh human civilization to create the and live the the change we want to see on the earth well put thank you very much john finney and the final word is yours thank you so much tom um if you can go visit places that have been restored go see farms that have been in regenerative agriculture you will be so moved and so inspired about what can happen in three or two short years for restoring water cycles bringing back biodiversity sequestering carbon whatever your topic human health i encourage you to dive into this and see for yourself whether on video or in real life what is actually possible regeneration is what the earth and our soil is asking us to participate in and i have been shocked time and time again with how quickly we can do it as alan william said what used to take us 10 to 20 years we're now doing in three to four the regenerative agriculture movement around the world is sharing knowledge sharing information basing itself on context for where what why how and helping farmers start to do this helping ecosystem managers start to do this more prolifically each of us can play a role in it every aspect of society that we have can play a role in altering our course towards restoration and regeneration together we can do it that is why i'm here i wouldn't be here if i didn't believe we can do this that's what brings me hope every day and gets me working all hours of the week all hours of the year to help this movement forward so i hope you join us thank you outstanding thank you fenny and i hope you've all enjoyed this program as much as i have i think we've covered a great deal of territory and learned quite a lot in just one hour and if you haven't already done so i strongly encourage you to make time to watch kiss the ground in its entirety it's it's well worth your time and once again with less than 10 years left to shift the path of our planet to combat climate change the un decade on ecosystem restoration calls to prevent halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean and closing on behalf of the north america offices of fao and unip in collaboration with kiss the ground i would again like to thank all of you for joining today's world environment day screening of and discussion on the critically acclaimed documentary film kiss the ground in particular i would like to thank all of you for your excellent engagement and participation in this discussion and of course i would like to thank our outstanding cast of speakers and lastly i'd like to pay a special thanks to my fao colleague adi muhammad for all of her excellent work in organizing this event so thank you stay safe and stay tuned