About GLF Africa 2022
GLF Africa 2022: How to build an equitable, resilient food future brought together over 8,500 participants from 122 countries and featured 182 leading scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, financiers, youth and government leaders, and 68 incredible partners to explore African solutions to the global food crisis caused by climate change, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
Across 31 plenaries, interactive sessions, launches, virtual tours, dialogues, performances, and a job fair, the digital conference explored ways to transform the future of food through healthy landscapes, equitable access to land, and shorter, greener value chains. Messages spread on social media rallied 26 million people around concrete ways for Africa to regain its food sovereignty.
The role of transformative policies in restoration
The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration promotes an inclusive restoration approach and biodiverse ecosystems, while also incrementing human well-being. Yet, implementation on the ground often reveals the conflict between the economic and ecological aspects of restoration. The forest landscape restoration (FLR) approaches and the development of sustainable value chains can only be successful in the long term if they are embedded in an enabling policy environment.
This session aims to explore how environmental policy instruments can trigger this transformative change and hence solve this conflict in ecosystem restoration. Speakers share three key messages on the role of transformative policies that support the implementation of forest landscape restoration initiatives:
- Sensitizing and mobilizing the community to understand the interlinkage between development and the ecosystem is crucial in solving conflicts. “There will be no landscape restoration initiative if the community is not at the heart of the initiative,” says Sunday Geogrey Mbafoambe, GLFx Chapter coordinator in Yaounde.
- There is a need to address the global biodiversity crisis, and to incorporate a broad perspective of the value of nature and its contribution to achieving a sustainable and just future. Policies that incentivize payments for ecosystem services and sustainable value chains are key to making landscape restoration more sustainable.
- Empirical evidence on protected areas is necessary for policy making. Evidence is equally crucial in creating awareness in the public on the importance of protected ecosystems.
