Investment pathways to ecosystem restoration in the Near East and North Africa.

The Near East and North Africa (NENA) region faces significant environmental challenges with significant socio-economic impacts. To date, restoration efforts have not yielded major results to address these challenges. Member countries across the region have set goals to meet their international commitments under the 3 RIO Conventions, focusing on land degradation neutrality, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation. However, many still face difficulties in translating these targets into actionable strategies due to insufficient technical and financial resources. The current challenge is mobilizing the necessary investments and political support to enable a paradigm shift in ecosystem restoration with long-term environmental and socio-economic impacts.

A regional investment framework that aligns national development goals with a holistic approach to ecosystem restoration and develops innovative partnership models and opportunities to support restoration initiatives is crucial to drive regional action. Financing for ecosystem restoration is a key requirement for more sustainable and impactful outcomes.

In the NENA region, investment in restoration projects faces significant challenges, particularly when intersecting with land tenure issues. Collective efforts play a critical role in implementing restoration initiatives. By engaging with local communities and providing job opportunities for rural populations and especially women and youth, we can ensure environmental protection and long-term viability of restoration efforts. Ensuring community and women land rights is an important step towards successful restoration.

In this context and under the umbrella of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, FAO, together with its regional partners —the League of Arab states, United Nations Environment Programme, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, and United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification— is in a unique position to support countries by providing technical capacity and facilitating multi-stakeholder dialogues at country and regional levels on investment opportunities for ecosystem restoration.

The session will highlight the linkage between investments and land tenure in NENA. It will provide a platform for knowledge exchange where countries can showcase their experiences on restoration initiatives and discuss investment challenges in restoration projects due to land tenure issues.

The session aims to:

• Raise awareness on the NENA Regional Integrated Ecosystem Restoration and Development Investment Initiative aimed to optimize financing and implementation of national and regional restoration initiatives.
• Provide a better understanding of how NENA member states might more effectively embed ecosystem restoration within their national strategic frameworks, and what policy adjustments are required to realign investment patterns with the objectives of sustainable restoration.
• Discuss investment-related challenges in restoration, particularly in relation to land tenure issues in the region and highlight the role of communities, women, and youth to achieve long-term sustainability of restoration projects.
• Highlight successful cases and explore strategies to enhance regional collaboration in developing and implementing ecosystem restoration initiatives in the NENA region.

Lessons learnt on biodiversity and drought resiliance: UNCBD & UNCCD COPs’ outcomes.

The Arab countries are facing big challenges fighting climate change and preserve their biodiversity. The desertification of Arable land and lack of water is affecting the region food security. While the Rio convention is trying to address the two issues through the UNCBD and the UNCCD, land tenure component is the key to sustainability in these two elements.

At COP 16-UNCBD, governments tasked with reviewing the state of implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Parties to the Convention are expected to show the alignment of their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) with the Framework. COP 16 will develop the monitoring framework and advance resource mobilization for the Global Biodiversity Framework, also due to finalize and operationalize the multilateral mechanism on the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources.

UNCCD COP16, are informed by the recommendations experts have drafted in the aftermath of Drought Resilience +10 guidance on core issues. With its 197 signatories, UNCCD is the only legally binding instrument that addresses land degradation and drought at the global level. The goal is mobilizing political, financial, and human capital to adequately anticipate, reduce, prepare for, and recover from drought risks. The objective is to communicate the messages and outcomes of these two events in an informative way to build synergies to mobilize resources and capacity to ensure secure tenure rights. Governments are expected to address their resilience in their National Action Plan.

While NBSAP’s and NAPS’s are overlapping, the session will also aim to explain the two and distinguish between them. Highlighting the importance of centered land governance and tenure security as a key to make NBSAP’S and NAP’s work to realize their objectives.

Confirmed Speakers/Facilitators:

Ward Anseaw, Land Tenure Lead, FAO

Eva Hershaw, Land Monitoring, International Land Coalition

Shahd Mustafa, EMENA coordinator, International Land Coalition

Aurelie Bres, Land and Tenure Officer, FAO

Advancing women’s tenure security in the EMENA region: reporting, data and initiatives to close the gap.

Land is the foundation for shelter, livelihood, and climate resilience. Land is fundamental for survival. Because land is central to power and identity, control over land is fundamental to justice. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, land is scarce and valuable. Demand for land is projected to dramatically increase to meet the needs of a fast-growing urban population. Within this context, MENA nations currently face extensive challenges to ensure justice in relation to women’s ability to use, own, access, and inherit land. Recent data shows deep gender divisions in tenure security, which is exacerbated in the contexts where conflict is often prevalent, reflecting the fragility of women land rights in the region. In short, we are in the midst of a gendered land crisis that must be addressed, if we are to advance broad development and environmental goals.

Within this bleak reality, there are entry points that can create pathways to advance women’s land rights in the Arab region and address some of the biggest challenges ahead. This session will: i) Highlight the ways in which land-related SDG indicators 5.a.1; 5.a.2 and 1.4.2 can advance women’s land rights in the region, ii) Review current data gaps and challenges across the Arab region through the recent PRIndex data. Iii) Review initiatives and case studies that have seen positive advancement of women’s land rights that can be and are applied in the region.

Participants will leave the session with a deeper understanding of the data that should inform approaches, opportunities for reporting mechanisms, specific initiatives and tools that are underway which can be used to advance women’s land rights, with engaged advocates and duty bearers who seek to move the needle on women’s land rights.

This session comes with a virtual discussion on the Land Mark platform, do already login to join the discussion!

Confirmed Speakers/Facilitators:

Didier Giscard, Senior Land Administration Specialist, World Bank

Shahd Mustafa, EMENA coordinator, International Land Coalition

Ward Anseaw, Land Tenure Lead, FAO

Oumou Kelthoum Niang, Team leader Youth, gender & innovation, FAO-Mauritania

Eva Hershaw, Land Monitoring, International Land Coalition

Data Collaboratives and tools for resilience for the Arab region.

Land data is a powerful tool to address the Arab region's pressing challenges in managing land, ranging from climate change impacts to social inequalities and ongoing conflicts. However, significant gaps in land data, exacerbated by closed data systems, limit equitable access to information, hinder informed decision-making and widen developmental gaps, with the significant displacement of people within the region, specifically marginalized groups and IDPs.

To overcome these barriers, this session will examine the model of Data Collaboratives (and their respective tools) as one approach to monitoring land use, securing land rights, and ensuring accountability. It will explore collaborative data efforts rather than isolated initiatives to address the challenges of poor land and data governance in the Arab region. The EC Data Partnership is one such example of a Data Collaborative. It brings together a broad range of partners, including the International Land Coalition (ILC), Land Portal, Prindex, and Land Matrix who share land data and expertise to support informed decision-making on land governance at multiple levels.

Tools such as the SOLIndex, Land Matrix, Prindex, Landex and LandMark offer insights into multiple dimensions of land issues. The collaboration among these initiatives broadens the focus from data transparency for its own sake, to actionable data that can fill data gaps and promote equity, accountability, and resilience.

The session aims to promote actions and showcase opportunities for stakeholders in the Arab region to engage with data collaboratives and use the tools to help foster collaborative data ecosystems for resilient and inclusive land governance systems.

Confirmed Speakers/Facilitators:

Dina Naguib, Arab states consulting coordinator for Data and land governance, Land Portal

Eva Hershaw, Land Monitoring, International Land Coalition

Shahd Mustafa, EMENA coordinator, International Land Coalition

Join the online discussion by registering in the Land Portal platform.

Civil Society Assembly

The Arab countries are facing big challenges fighting climate change and preserve their biodiversity. The desertification of Arable land and lack of water is affecting the region food security. While local communities are busy trying to implement practices securing tenure security within the harsh water scarcity condition and shrinking civic space. ILC empowers CSO’s through creation of coalitions of local and regional organization to achieve more impact working together using available tools and mechanisms to advocate for people centered land governance.

The session will focus on presenting how coalitions could be built nationally and regionally, what Role can the CSO play in improving tenure security as well as preserving biodiversity and achieve food security. In addition to the available tools, data and mechanism to achieve that.

The session will be dedicated to explain and also to understand how CSO perceive their interaction with different stakeholders and their needs that could be addressed through Arab Land Initiative and its partners.

Confirmed Speakers/Facilitators

Shahd Mustafa, EMENA Coordinator, ILC.

Matteo Sposato, EMENA NLCs / Knowledge and Research, ILC.

Thaer Fakhoury, ACAD - Palestine.

Raed Gharib, Seed - Jordan.

Amina Amharsh, AZUL - Morocco.