Land Day 2 Stressed on Land Issues in the
Ongoing Climate Change Negotiations
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Land Day 2 was a one-day event organized by the Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in order to attract the attention of policy- and decision makers to the importance of land issues in the ongoing climate change negotiations. The event took place on 5 June 2010, in parallel to the meetings of the subsidiary bodies of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) taking place from 31 May to 11 June 2010, in Bonn. It was a follow-up to Land Day 1, held in 2009 under a similar context and arrangement. Land Day 2 focused on three dimensions: how synergetic implementation of the actions mandated under the climate change and desertification Conventions can be fostered at the country levels; how land and soil fit into the post-2012 climate change agreement; and what negotiators need to know about water and land assets in confronting climate change. |
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In his keynote speech on the interconnectivity of climate change and land, Mr Ian Johnson, Secretary General of the Club of Rome warned that small changes in the climate may result in large impacts on land. He identified the flaws in the contemporary economic model, which fails to take proper account of long term sustainability and propagates inequality. He called for a new model that is rooted in systems thinking, and places land use and land use change in this wider context. He also called for resource mobilization on a massive scale, investment in research and initiatives aimed at multifunctional farming.
Mr Richard Kinley, deputy Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC said the two conventions have many things in common and land is the bridge between climate change adaptation and mitigation. According to Mr Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, convergence can be searched between the national action programmes (NAPs) of the UNCCD and the national adaptation programmes of action (NAPAs) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In the discussion that followed at the end of the first session, participants emphasized that interest-driven institutional competition and the proliferation of financial mechanisms to support planned activities tend to undermine synergy. They highlighted the conditions with the potential to promote synergy: a focus on the national and local government levels; integration of the action plans in national development strategies, based on sound arguments about the benefits of investment to reverse land degradation; the flow of resources to the local levels and elaboration of principles to support synergy and tools or indicators to monitor it.
The speakers and participants in the second session, which was dedicated to land and food security in a changing climate, discussed the role of farming, including agroforestry and sustainable farming practices, the vulnerability of the farmers to climate change and desertification, especially in the developing countries, how to increase the motivation of farmers to enter the carbon-offset markets, and the co-benefits of addressing climate change and land degradation through sustainable land management.
The third session was dedicated to sustainable land and water management as priority adaptation measures to address climate change. Many of the speakers shared the opinion that the process of adaptation to climate change is not possible without addressing the proper management of land and water. During the discussion segment, participants proposed that negotiators bear in mind that: the adaptation dimension of water is a very local issue, and global policy frameworks only facilitate the work of the government and local people; selling success stories that emphasize the potential for change in building on the knowledge that has been gained would lead to more successful resource mobilization; MDGs are fragmented, but there is growing interest to integrate them in the context of Rio+20 in 2012.
Additional information: Land Day 2 Proceedings