Join us for a live discussion with World Vision’s Tony Rinaudo, WRI’s Robert Winterbottom and other experts on Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration – a key strategy for restoring degraded lands, achieving food security, and enriching rural areas.

Throughout the developing world, huge tracts of farmland, grazing lands and forests have become degraded to the point they are barely productive. This has an extremely detrimental effect on subsistence farming households and their communities who make up a large proportion of rural populations and who suffer regularly from hunger and malnutrition. In September 2014, governments, corporations, indigenous peoples’ groups and CSOs signed the New York Declaration on Forests pledging to restore 350 million hectares of degraded forest land by 2030. Among the key approaches that is central to achieving this goal isFarmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR).

FMNR is a low-cost, sustainable land regeneration system that can be used to rapidly and efficiently return degraded croplands and grazing lands to productivity. It also restores biodiversity and increases resilience to severe weather events. Since its inception in Niger in 1983, FMNR has spread across five million hectares or 50 percent of that country’s farmlands, which is the largest positive environmental transformation in Africa in the last 100 years. Since then, FMNR has been introduced in 18 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste, and most recently India and Haiti.

Tony Rinaudo, who serves as Natural Resources Management Advisor for World Vision, is considered among the forefathers of FMNR. He has committed his life to reforesting degraded lands and bringing hope to poor communities through FMNR and has often been described as ‘the Tree Whisperer’. In collaboration with Bob Winterbottom from World Resources Institute, Tony will lead a panel presentation and discussion on emerging lessons from promoting FMNR across a variety of landscapes. The seminar will provide participants with further insight on World Vision’s work to promote FMNR globally and an opportunity to explore strategies for strengthening evidence and scale-up of this proven model.

Speakers

• Tony Rinaudo, Principal Natural Resource Advisor, World Vision Australia
• Robert Winterbottom, Senior Fellow with the Food, Forests and Water Program, World Resources Institute