Date: 9th October 2018

Time: 12:30-16:00 BST

Location: Overseas Development Institute, London

Summary

Join LEGEND for the 7^th UK Land Policy Forum meeting to discuss the common ground and potential linkages between efforts to promote responsible investment in land for economic development and promoting better land governance to tackle climate change and prevent deforestation. This meeting is organised in collaboration with DFID’s Partnerships for Forests (P4F) programme. Discussion will draw on emerging lessons and look ahead to building synergies and stronger stakeholder collaboration on land and forest governance, with a focus on African contexts.

Africa’s remaining forests and woodlands are under heavy pressure from growing populations, agricultural land use, logging, and commercial development. Forests provide an important basis for livelihoods and environmental protection and have untapped economic potentials, but land rights are generally undocumented and governance is weak. 

This UK Land Policy Forum meeting explores how forest protection, secure land rights and responsible investment in forest areas can be combined, and the roles that DFID programmes are playing in this space. The panel will focus on the following questions:

• How can we promote investments in forest land that are genuinely responsible, sustainable and inclusive of local people?
• What lessons are emerging from current programmes on how to strengthen forest land governance? 
• How can international finance best contribute to meeting poverty, development and climate goals in forest landscapes and regions?
• How could programming to meet land governance, sustainable agriculture and forest land use objectives be better linked? 

Speakers

• Terry Green, Director of Palladium and Partnerships for Forests (P4F). Terry will give a brief overview of P4F’s approach to sustainable investment in forests, including the land tenure issues involved. Funded by the UK’s Departments for International Development (DFID) as well as for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), P4F aims to put 1 million hectares of land under sustainable management by 2020.
• Victoria Wiafe Duah, Manager – Environment Practice (EMEA) at Palladium. Victoria will be travelling to London from Ghana, where she manages the Partnership for Productivity Protection and Resilience in Cocoa Landscapes (PPRCL) for P4F and Palladium. Together with Touton, the project provides farm-level support to 60,000 cocoa farmers to improve their livelihoods through the use of, amongst other measures, a landscape governance board with oversight of land use management and forest protection.
• Isabelle Adam, Head of Corporate Relations, Touton S.A., Ghana. Isabelle will be joining the meeting from Ghana to offer a company perspective of PPRCL. Touton is a leading agro-industrial producer, processor and trader of cocoa, coffee, vanilla and other natural ingredients. The company is the lead organisation of PPRCL project and helps adopt a multi-stakeholder, landscape-wide, governance approach to eliminating deforestation footprints in the cocoa supply chain.
• Stephanie Doig, EHSS Director at Miro Forestry. Stephanie will join us from Miro, a forestry company with operations in West Africa and headquartered in London. Miro is supported by P4F to demonstrate how the charcoal industry in Ghana can transition from current unsustainable production trends by utilizing thinning, prunings and other waste products from forest plantations. Stephanie will share a practical experience of land rights in West Africa based on work with over 60 communities who Miro directly leases land from.
• Simon Norfolk, Director/Partner of Terra Firma. Dialling-in from Mozambique, Simon will give a presentation of the ORAM/Portucel pilot project supported by LEGEND’s Challenge Fund. This project uses an integrated approach to securing community, family and individual land rights by partnering with Portucel, a major forestry investor. The pilot includes the creation of 20 representative entities at community level, the development of detailed community land use plans, certified tenure over land resources for 14,000 households and the creation of a legitimate local land administration system.
• John Nelson, Mentor at The Forest Trust (TFT). John will offer a community perspective of forest and land governance initiatives. He will draw on the practical experience of logging in the Congo Basin, a region that has been targeted for its natural resources to the detriment of indigenous “Pygmy” communities. Together with the forestry company Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), The Forest Trust secured funding from the World Bank to help formally recognise indigenous peoples’ rights to land and resources by developing mapping tools.

Agenda

Dial in details

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Meeting ID : 421981479

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