Under the theme of “Rights-Led Transformation Toward Climate-Resilient Landscapes”, this iteration of the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), taking place this coming June 22-23, will explore the essential contributions made by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, rural women and youth to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the targets laid out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.  The aim is to highlight the transformative role of rights and rights-based approaches, and how they can contribute to a more just, sustainable and prosperous future for the global community through landscapes. It promises to be the world’s single largest forum on rights and sustainable landscapes and we are excited to take part!

Live from GLF2019 - Defending nature together: tackling growing threats against land rights defenders

More specifically, our own session on Open Space for Restoration, Rights and Geodata, organized in collaboration with our colleagues at GIZ, Germany’s international development agency, will take you through the importance of land rights, and the role of geo-data to register or otherwise strengthen land rights.  It will build on and contribute to the panel discussion on “Challenges in implementing a rights-based approach to sustainable management and restoration of landscapes and forests.”, also organized by GIZ and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)

The session promises to include short face-to-face discussions with guest speakers from the panel discussion, and will explore many aspects of land rights and restoration, from indigenous people to big data:

• What is the ‘space’ for land rights in sustainable landscape management/restoration?

• Restoration means multiple things at the same time. What are your top 3 priorities?

• What is the ‘space’ for data (spatial data, open data, etc.) in sustainable landscape management and landscape restoration?

The goal is to include as many voices as possible in our conversation.  In order to do this, these informal but engaging chats will be captured via short videos and blogs for dissemination during and after the GLF. During the Learning Café itself, we will also be engaging our audience giving them the possibility to interact with us through the virtual arena of Wisembly.

The Learning Café will be open to all GLF participants, but we will give a special opportunity to the youth at GLF, by inviting them to approach the guest speakers for informal talks before and after their interviews.

We are sure that these interactions and coming together of ideas will help to enrich the soon to be launched open-access online portfolio on forest and landscape restoration (FLR) that is being developed by the Land Portal Foundation in partnership with GIZ and other organizations.