Summary
Highlights for Monday, 27 May 2019
Global Soil Week 2019 (GSW 2019) opened on Monday morning, 27 May, with the two-day technical segment of the conference. During the opening plenary, Co-Facilitators Alice Kaudia, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Eco-Entrepreneurs Ltd., and Alexander Alexander Müller, Töpfer, Müller, Gaßner — Think Tank for Sustainability (TMG Research), welcomed representatives from government, science, NGOs, and international organizations, as well as farmers, and introduced the conference theme, ‘Creating an Enabling Environment for Sustainable and Climate Resilient Agriculture in Africa.’
Explaining the rationale for the conference, Müller observed that four years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the world is still not on track to achieve these ambitious global targets. He noted that discussions at GSW 2019 would seek to explore the “missing middle” that is critical for delivering the Global Goals, including access to finance and legislative and governance frameworks that ensure secure access to land, productive resources and decision making processes, especially for women and other marginalized actors at the local level.Participants then convened in five working groups for the rest of the day to discuss experiences from more than 20 local projects in Africa and Asia. The discussions took an in-depth look at some of the factors that support or hinder the creation of an enabling environment for sustainable and climate-resilient agriculture
Some of the broad themes addressed in the presentations included:
• Good practices to empower women’s participation in sustainable land management and decision-making;
• Innovative approaches to secure smallholder farmers' access to land, finance and other agricultural inputs;
• Business models to strengthen financial and market inclusion for smallholder farmers and pastoralists;
• Opportunities to strengthen participatory governance systems for sustainable soil management and ecosystem restoration;
• Mechanisms for bridging macro- and micro-level land governance structures; and
• How to ensure sustainability of promising local initiatives.
IISD Reporting Services, through its ENB+ Meeting Coverage, provided daily web coverage from GSW 2019. In addition, IISD Reporting Services has published a summary report from the meeting, which is available in HTML and PDF.
Photos by IISD/ENB | Francis Dejon
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Analysis of Cases - Parallel Implementers' Workshops
