But those extensive, interconnected ecosystems are increasingly fragmented and degraded by unsustainable agriculture and ranching, illegal logging, unmitigated mining, and exploitative commercial fishing practices.

Scientists from Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment — economists, fisheries and wildlife biologists, and international policy experts — are deeply engaged in the region, working in the Amazon’s critical ecosystems to understand and help reshape the daily land-use and natural resource management decisions that are currently driving deforestation, over-fishing, water degradation, and social inequity.

CONTINUE READING

Source: Acacia

Read the letter: www.bankonhumanrights.org/BRICS
Suggested Tweets:  A new development model for the New Development Bank: http://bit.ly/1HKGMVU @BRICS2015 #Ufasummit #Bricsbank #BankonRights

Grupos Proponen Nuevo Modelo de Desarrollo para el Nuevo Banco de Desarrollo
Hoy, mientras los paises BRICS (Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudáfrica) se reúnen en la Cumbre de los BRICS en Ufa, Rusia para lanzar el Nuevo Banco de Desarrollo (NBD), mas de 40 organizaciones de la sociedad civil y movimientos sociales de todo el mundo enviaron una carta abierta llamando a los BRICS que se rompan con los modelos de desarrollo fallados del pasado y aseguren que el NBD es verdaderamente algo nuevo. La carta describe 4 Principios para Nuevo Modelo de Desarrollo: 1) Promover un desarrollo para todos; 2) Ser transparente y democrático 3) Establecer estándares fuertes y asegurar su cumplimiento; 4) Promover el desarrollo sustentable.

Ver la carta aqui: www.bankonhumanrights.org/BRICS
Para Twitter: Un nuevo modelo de desarrollo para el Nuevo Banco de Desarrollo: http://bit.ly/1HKGMVU  @BRICS2015 #Ufasummit #Bricsbank #BankonRights

Portuguese: Um novo modelo de desenvolvimento para o Novo Banco de Desenvolvimento: http://bit.ly/1HKGMVU @BRICS2015 #Ufasummit #Bricsbank #BankonRights

Groupes proposent un nouveau modèle de développement pour la Nouvelle Banque de Développement
Alors que des délégations gouvernementales du Brésil, de la Russie, de l’Inde, de la Chine et de l’Afrique du Sud se réunissent à l’occasion du Sommet des
BRICS à Oufa, en Russie, pour le lancement de la Nouvelle banque de développement (NBD), plus de 40 groupes de la société civile et mouvements
sociaux envoyé une lettre ouverte exhortant à BRICS rompre avec les modèles ce passé, et respecter 4 principes pour un nouveau modèle de
développement: 1) Promouvoir le développement pour tous et toutes; 2) Faire preuve de transparence et de démocratie; 3) Établir des normes
rigoureuses et veiller à ce qu’elles soient respectées; 4) Favoriser le développement durable.

lisiez la lettre: www.bankonhumanrights.org/BRICS
Pour Twitter: Un nouveau modèle de développement pour la Nouvelle Banque de Développement: http://bit.ly/1HKGMVU @BRICS2015 #Ufasummit #Bricsbank

Source: Acacia

UK’s standards for Forest Management is one of a series of seminars, hosted by The National School of Forestry throughout 2015.

This seminar will look at the UK’s standards for Forest Management and assess future plans.

The speaker will be:

• Peter Fox, Forestry Commission, Forest Management Plans and the UK Forest Standard

Location 

The seminar will take place at the Beehive Building on its Ambleside Campus.

The Barn
Rydal Road
Ambleside
Cumbria
LA22 9BB

Booking & Further Information

Places for this seminar are free, but bookings can be made by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

For further information on this seminar series, visit the National School of Forestry website.  

Source: Acacia

The report reveals the mitigation potential of smallholder farming, finding that helping farmers adapt to the impacts of climate change can also significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and that mitigation could be another benefit of adaptation activities. The report shows that 13 IFAD-supported adaptation projects could reduce GHG emissions by 30 million tons, which represents about 38% of IFAD’s 2020 emissions reduction target under its Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP).

Launching the report, Michel Mordasini, IFAD Vice President, stated that smallholder farmers are “a key part of the solution to the climate change challenge,” and that, with the right investments, “smallholders can feed a growing planet while at the same time restoring degraded ecosystems and reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint.”

Sonja Vermeulen, Head of Research, CCAFS, highlighted new opportunities in light of the role smallholder adaptation plays in helping reduce global emissions. Noting that, currently, over 90% of public and private climate funds go to mitigation as opposed to adaptation, she stated that, for future food security, “it would be very helpful if the majority of the world’s farmers, who are smallholders, could access those funds.” [UN Press Release] [IFAD Press Release]

Source: Forests Policy & Practice

The report says that policies to achieve the SDGs must be designed and implemented in an integrated manner in order to maximize progress towards achieving all the goals, and analyzes the interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs among the natural resource-related SDGs that must be considered when formulating policies for their implementation. The report includes sections on: challenges to achieving the SDGs; understanding synergies, conflicts and trade-offs; and seeking synergies and avoiding trade-offs.

Addressing the report’s findings, UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said that achieving the SDGs will require fundamental shifts in the way “in which humanity views the natural environment in relation to human development,” and highlighted opportunities for synergies between goals that would help ensure progress towards one goal strengthens the achievement of others.

The report’s findings contend that if the energy, food security and climate change SDGs are addressed by sectoral polices, potential trade-offs will occur between food systems, biodiversity, climate mitigation, nutrient pollution and freshwater use. For example, progress towards SDGs related to food security, energy production, and water and sanitation all depend on the very same land systems that are subject to conservation strategies aimed at maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Thus, the SDGs should be tackled as “an integrated, coordinated package,” understanding the different goals, their resource requirements, managing synergies and mitigating trade-offs. In addition, the report suggests combining policies with sustainable consumption and production measures, and ensuring environmental and social safeguards.

In adopting and implementing the SDGs, the report specifically recommends that the international community: maintain a sustainable resource management perspective that recognizes the importance of restoration, conservation, efficiency and decoupling strategies for achieving the SDGs; promote synergies and avoid environment-development trade-offs among the SDGs through analyzing natural resource and socioeconomic system interactions; create coherence and coordination among policy strategies for achieving multiple SDGs to achieve co-benefits and avoid counterproductive results; adopt consumption patterns and production systems that contribute to human well-being without putting unsustainable pressures on the environment and resources; and build national capacities for integrated policy assessment, technological innovation and financial mobilization to enable countries to formulate and implement integrated strategies.

IRP consists of more than 30 experts and scientists and over 30 national governments, is hosted by UNEP’s Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (DTIE). It was established in 2007 to provide policy-relevant scientific assessments to governments and other stakeholders on the efficient and effective use of natural resources. [Publication: Policy Coherence of the Sustainable Development Goals: A Natural Resource Perspective] [UNEP Press Release] [UNEP Knowledge Repository]

Source: Forests Policy & Practice

Held from 22-23 June 2015, the workshop was organized by the Centre for International Development and Training, Forest Peoples Programme and the Community and Forest Platform Cameroon with financial support from the EU. It gathered parliamentarians from the region, including from Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Gabon.

The workshop recommended the development of media programmes to build awareness on forest governance, and technical and financial support for collaboration among parliamentarians, civil society organizations and journalists. [Congo Basin Forest Partnership News Release (in French)]

Source: Forests Policy & Practice

The Multi-dimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN) advocates for including an improved Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI 2015+ or MPI 2.0) in the SDGs, arguing that a post-2015 development agenda with a headline indicator of poverty at $1.25 will miss insights and is unlikely to end many of the disadvantages faced by people living in poverty. MPPN argues the MPI 2015+ would show: how people are poor; the inequalities among those living in poverty; and to which regions or ethnic groups they belong. Several countries and state governments have adopted official multidimensional poverty measures, including Bhutan, Colombia, Chile and Mexico, the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and Ho Chi Minh City in Viet Nam.

“More needs to be done to reduce the number of global indicators to avoid overburdening statistical systems,” Eve de la Mothe Karoubi, Jessica Espey and Guido Schmidt-Traub, Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Secretariat, emphasize in a blog post. They recommend: no more than 100 harmonized global SDG indicators; multi-purpose indicators to track several targets; and an annex of complementary indicators. They urge the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) to: consider an integrated indicator framework covering all targets instead of discussing individual targets; and mobilize expertise from outside the UN System, including from business.

In an ‘UGEC Viewpoints’ blog, four scholars analyze proposed SDG targets and indicators related to transportation, participation and planning, and per capita environmental impacts, with a focus on developing urban SDG applications in the cities of Atlanta, US, and Delhi, India. They emphasize the importance of a comparative framework of core indicators and data, cautioning that “without appropriate indicators, the UN runs the risk of adopting metrics with limited saliency, legitimacy or credibility.” They describe the fit between potential indicators and the goal intent as “square pegs, round holes,” explaining that the proposed one indicator per target does not account for the complexity of urbanization and the multi-dimensional nature of the urban SDG. Other highlighted findings include that: most global data collection is not at the spatial or temporal scale necessary for the urban SDG; and measurement of transboundary environmental impacts remains a challenge.

In a Vertic Brief released in June, Joy Hyvarinen and Larry MacFaul discuss ‘Monitoring progress towards the SDGs,’ including the development of a monitoring and review framework. The authors describe the role of the IAEG-SDGs in developing the indicator framework and the work of other stakeholder groups in developing and proposing indicators. They identify the “expansive scope of the SDGs” as the main challenge in developing a monitoring framework, noting that monitoring progress will involve metrics from multiple disciplines.

The Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) and its partners released an issue brief, ‘Towards an Integrated and Inclusive Follow-up and Review of Natural Resources,’ that features two recommendations on aligning the follow-up and review of natural resources in the post-2015 development agenda with the principles of integration, participation and inclusion. They recommend: carrying out thematic reviews of natural resources as a cross-cutting issue under the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF); and establishing and strengthening national multi-stakeholder and rights-holder initiatives for follow-up and review, within the context of a renewed global partnership for development.

In a blog, Duncan Green of Oxfam muses on next steps to make the SDGs have impact and be relevant for governments. His suggestions include: a monitoring and reporting process that steadily increases pressures on governments; and an implementation mechanism like the one used by the Open Governance Partnership, where countries sign up to an overarching vision and develop their own action plans with concrete commitments.

In an article in the Global Policy Journal, Mihaela Gruia argues that the Group of 7 (G7) has “done little to steer the debate in relation to bolder governance for development,” including on three issues that the SDGs have failed to address: the need for clarity of purpose, realistic targets and opportunities for measuring success; the lack of quantifiable or delineated governance targets; and the absence of compliance mechanisms. She suggests that G7 leadership could help to create better governance mechanisms for ensuring progress on the SDGs.

In a policy statement, the Women’s Major Group outlines ten “red flags” in the June 2015 zero draft of the post-2015 development agenda, which it argues need to be addressed to achieve transformative change. These issues include: recognizing gender equality and the human rights of women and girls as a cross-cutting issue; strengthening commitments to human rights and inclusivity; recognizing and supporting civil society and major group participation; regulating the role of the private sector; and prioritizing means of implementation (MOI). The Group recommends the Vision and Call for Action acknowledge ways in which the current economic model has contributed to inequalities and environmental degradation, and that the Political Declaration emphasize commitments to well-being of people and the planet.

Beyond 2015 addresses world leaders in a letter on 17 June, 100 days before the UN Summit. They call on governments to: start planning the implementation process; begin integrating the proposed SDGs into national development plans and policies; commit to continued dialogue at all levels; and ensure participatory approaches for monitoring and follow-up.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and CARE released a policy brief, ‘Twin Tracks,’ that examines how the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and post-2015 development process can support each other. The brief analyzes the two draft frameworks and illustrates the need for eradicating poverty and promoting sustainable lifestyles for a low-carbon world. It emphasizes the importance of: recognizing the two processes as a key opportunity for tackling climate change, poverty eradication and sustainable development; a strong, visible climate change narrative and goal in the post-2015 framework and a recognition of sustainable development needs in the Paris climate agreement; and capitalizing on synergies between the processes to ensure implementation of both frameworks.

Every proposed SDG could be impacted by climate change, according to a blog post by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Climate change will also add to the costs of achieving the proposed SDGs, according to IIED, which cites estimates that the additional costs could amount to seven percent of Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2100. IIED recommends aligning discussions on climate change, development and financing.

“International humanitarian assistance alone is neither sufficient nor appropriate to address the scale and complexity of today’s crises, or the underlying drivers of instability, poverty and vulnerability,” according to the Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report 2015. It finds that 93% of people living in extreme poverty are in countries that are either environmentally vulnerable or fragile. It recommends a shared responsibility among humanitarian, climate change and development actors to build resilience, address underlying causes of crises and meet the long-term needs of those affected by crisis. [MPPN Website on Post-2015 Agenda] [Guardian Article on MPI 2015+] [CARE and WWF Brief] [IIED Blog] [GHA Report Website] [GHA Report 2015 Executive Summary] [SDSN Blog on Indicators] [Publication: Monitoring progress towards the SDGs] [IASS Brief] [Oxfam Blog] [Women’s Major Group Policy Paper] [Global Policy Journal Article] [Beyond 2015 Letter]

Source: Forests Policy & Practice

The draft decision adopted at the ELM recognizes that the negotiating text resulting from a process launched at the 6th FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conference in 2011 includes a commitment to explore ways to find common ground on the LBA by 2020, if not before. By setting this 2020 deadline, signatories are showing their commitment to a future agreement that could strengthen the implementation of a coherent forest policy in the pan-European region, as well as sustainable forest management (SFM). The decision is expected to be adopted by ministers at the Extraordinary Ministerial Conference, which will take place on 21 October 2015 in Madrid, and will be held in conjunction with the 7th FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conference to be held from 19-23 October 2015.

During another ELM convened from 30 June to 2 July 2015, also in Madrid, delegates approved a number of draft documents and agreed to forward them to the forthcoming Ministerial Conference. These documents include: a declaration recognizing the need to address global challenges related to European forests; a resolution highlighting the potential of forests in transitioning to a green economy and their role as a source of employment; a resolution underlining the need to reinforce forest protection and SFM, and to strengthen cooperation at the pan-European level to address forest threats; and a decision on the future direction of FOREST EUROPE.

ELM participants were also briefed on preliminary findings of two reports that will be presented at the FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conference: the FOREST EUROPE report ‘State of Europe’s Forests 2015,’ which analyzes the status and changes in forests and forest management in Europe; and a mid-term evaluation on progress made in achieving the goals and European 2020 targets for forests, which were agreed at the Oslo Ministerial Conference in 2011. [FOREST EUROPE news on ELM for Extraordinary Ministerial Conference] [FOREST EUROPE news on ELM for 7th Ministerial Conference] [ELM on Extraordinary Ministerial Conference Information] [ELM on 7th Ministerial Conference Information]

Source: Forests Policy & Practice

www.foresteuropemadrid2015.org.  This website enables users to search for and find all the information related to both the 7^th and the Extraordinary FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conferences. 

It will be the main information point about the FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conferences to be held this year.  It brings together all the relevant information about decisions to be taken at the Conferences, registration for the events, practical information for the Conferences’ attendees, and useful communication material for the media. 

The website was launched today after the closure of two Expert Level Meetings (ELMs) held in Madrid from 30 June to 2 July.  These were convened to prepare the forthcoming FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conferences.  At these ELMs, the delegates from the FOREST EUROPE signatories approved the decisions that will be presented and adopted by the ministers responsible for forests in Europe at the 7^th FORESTS EUROPE Ministerial Conference and the FOREST EUROPE Extraordinary Ministerial Conference, which will receive the results of the work of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Legally Binding Agreement on Forests in Europe.  These two significant conferences will be held one after the other on 20-21 October 2015 in Madrid (Spain).

The website content will be updated regularly.

Source: Acacia

Source: Acacia