Arusha International Conference Center

Gathering Landscape Leaders from Across Africa for Peer-to-peer Learning and agenda-setting from the grassroots.

27 Sub-Saharan African countries have pledged to restore, or begin the process of restoring, over 96 million hectares of degraded land on the continent by 2030. 40 SSA countries include climate change mitigation from Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry in their (intended) Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for the Paris Climate Accord. 34 NDCs include mitigation contributions from agriculture. Every African nation has signed on to the Sustainable Development Goals. The question now asked regularly: how will our countries keep these commitments?

And more to the point, how will our countries keep these commitments while facing rising population pressure on fragile resources, increasing food demand for that growing population, the requirements on natural resources for new employment opportunities, and the environmental service demands of rapidly growing urban centers?

As national and international programs on sustainable land and water management, climate smart agriculture and land restoration grow, it is critical to empower and ensure the participation of African landscape leaders in the decision-making and execution of these initiatives. Focus has to be put on sustainable and inclusive development at the local level, which will require a massive investment in the capacity of African landscape leaders.

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