ATREE is at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh from November 11 to 16
The AREST team from ATREE is organising four events this year at the Food Systems and India pavilions.
How do we repair India’s degrading soils, what does good ecological restoration entail and why must we urgently conserve grassland ecosystems? ATREE is at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, from November 11 to 16, to talk about these and other pressing issues at the annual United Nations climate conference.
ATREE is organising four events this year at the Food Systems and India pavilions. In addition to leading panel discussions, we will also discuss the handbook we put together that details socially and ecologically responsible restoration practices. This guide is the result of work done under the Alliance for Reversing Ecosystem Service Threats (AREST) project.
Read | AREST’s Seven-Step Plan to Restore Degraded Land in Peninsular India
If you’re in Sharm el-Sheikh, reach us at arest@atree.org. We would love to meet you! If you’re tuning in virtually, there’s a livestream of the Food Systems Pavilion events you can watch on this link.
Here’s the full schedule; don’t forget to mark your calendars:
Team ATREE at COP27
- Abi Tamim Vanak | avanak@atree.org
- Anuja Malhotra | anuja.malhotra@atree.org
- Milind Bunyan | milind.bunyan@atree.org
- Sandeep Hanchanale | sandeep.hanchanale@atree.org
If you would like to collaborate with us, please write to one of us directly or to arest@atree.org.
About the AREST alliance
AREST is a coalition of partners working to co-design and execute a people-centric and demand-based strategy to restore India’s degraded lands. The past few decades have seen several land restoration success cases, by the government and civil society organizations, at the site level. We want to make these possible on a larger scale. We believe that when grassroots interventions are successful, it is critical to ensure that they can be scalable, and monitored systematically and scientifically to ensure their long-term sustainability.
Food Systems Pavilion | November 11, 2022 | 9.30 PM IST (6:00 PM GMT+2) | Creating win-wins on soil: Rewarding smallholder farmers for building soil organic carbon
Despite the potential of soils to store carbon, soil carbon markets have had difficulties even in advanced economies with very large farm sizes. The panelists will discuss successful approaches by which smallholder farmers have been rewarded for boosting soil organic carbon. How can such efforts be scaled? What are the institutional architectures needed to overcome the transaction cost problem while protecting smallholders’ interests?
Read | To address climate change, grow and restore soil, not trees
India Pavilion | November 12, 2022 | 7.30 PM IST (4:00 PM GMT+2) | Tree-based food system transformation for improving lives and the environment
Restoring food systems through a tree-based diversified functional production system can reduce the impact of climate change and environmental degradation while promoting enhanced food diversity, health, livelihoods, equity, income, and governance across the world. The event will deliberate on the transformations brought through tree-based food systems, both agroforestry, and trees outside the forests (TOF) for improving lifestyle and the environment.
India Pavilion | November 15, 2022 | 4.30 PM IST (1:00 PM GMT+2) | Open Natural Ecosystems for People, Carbon and Biodiversity
At this one-hour slot at the India pavilion, we will screen a film on the Banni grasslands reserve in Gujarat (linked below) and talk about how important ONEs are for millions of pastoralist communities and wildlife (including endangered species such as the Great Indian Bustard).
It is also important in the context of climate action as these landscapes sequester huge amounts of carbon. Despite these vital benefits, these habitats are declining rapidly. Some of our most recent research on grasslands was summarised in this policy brief we published last month and distributed among forest officers in Maharashtra at a workshop we attended in Pune on October 18.
Food Systems Pavilion | November 16, 2022 | 2:30 PM IST (11:00 AM GMT+2) | A restoration handbook: What does socially and ecologically responsible ecosystem restoration look like?
The team will be taking to COP27 a scalable land restoration plan, co-designed with local stakeholders, that can be adapted to the unique challenges of different ecosystems, and to the needs of the people who live there. AREST aims to restore 12 million hectares of land in 13 states, 204 districts, and 90 million households in semi-arid and sub-humid zones of peninsular India, across three critical ecosystems — agricultural lands, riparian habitats, and Open Natural Ecosystems.
