Global Landscapes Forum: Best of 2020

In recent years, conservation approaches that promote strict separation of humans and nature have fallen under criticism, largely owing to their disregard for rural and Indigenous communities who manage and depend on protected areas.

Download Indigenous Peoples’ status as critical and time-immemorial biodiversity guardians shouldn’t need verifying, but a series of recent studies are finally opening the global conservation scene’s eyes to the pivotal role that they play in preserving the world’s ecosystems.

Simultaneously avoiding dangerous climate change, halting and reversing dramatic biodiversity loss and meeting the needs of a growing global human population are three interlinked and critical goals we must achieve in this half-century. Climate change is increasingly recognised as a global emergency, with the current ~1°C of global warming already negatively affecting people and nature all around the world (IPCC, 2018; IPCC 2019a,b).

Transforming the world’s food and land use systems is necessary to achieve the targets for climate and sustainable development set out in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) was launched in 2017 to catalyse and speed up this transformation.

The economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic involves both short-term priorities and longer term planning of the eventual recovery. The immediate need is to continue mobilising public health resources and actions to contain, suppress and ultimately eradicate the virus.

There is an urgent need to mobilize finance at scale to support nature-based solutions if we are to have any hope of responding effectively to the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises.

We need 700 billion dollars to reverse the global biodiversity crisis—here’s how we get it.

Biodiversity loss, rapid deforestation and forest degradation appear to be some of the root causes behind the emergence of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.

Biodiversity, on which humanity depends, is being lost at an unprecedented rate. And the diversity of human cultures which has sustained biodiversity for millennia is fast disappearing. In 2021, governments will agree a new set of post-2020 targets for addressing biodiversity loss.

Trees (provenances, species genotypes) from the right seed sources should be suited to their purpose and environment.

In our very first episode that coincides with International Women’s Day, we highlight the lives of the world’s invisible heroes: women farmers who feed the world. Our guests Houria Djoudi, CIFOR Senior Scientist, Sustainable Landscape and Livelihood team, and Ana Maria Paez-Valencia, ICRAF Scientist on Gender Unit, share their insights on the roles of women in forest communities and the inspiration for their research with women around the world.

The four principles of organic agriculture are the roots from which organic agriculture grows and develops. They express the contribution that organic agriculture can make to the world, and a vision to improve all agriculture in a global context.