Events

This session was dedicated to the presentation of current initiatives tackling land issues, the objective being to share views and priorities in order to emphasize convergence between these initiatives.

The purpose of Session 4 was to present some technical aids, including tools and guides, that can support countries to plan and achieve LDN.  The session emphasised new tools and policy approaches developed and recently published by the SPI.

The session took a varied approach and began with an overview of what had happened previously. This was necessary because some participants had joined only one or two sessions or were just joining at the start of session 6, and we wanted to avoid repetition of the same issues that had already been discussed earlier on in the day. Panel members spanning a range of different stakeholder groups then gave 3-minute interventions, also taking questions from the audience. We left a vacant seat on the stage to enable audience members to become panellists in a ‘fish bowl’ participatory approach. This made the session much more dynamic and interactive and allowed a range of different interventions that may not otherwise have been captured, as the person making the intervention or asking the question took the empty seat in order to participate. A journalist then summarised the major highlights and the artist who had been painting during the day talked the audience through his paintings and what they represented. 

Dr. Mariam Akhtar-Schuster welcomed the participants to the full-day UNCCD-SPI First Science Day and emphasised that the Science Day should provide a unique opportunity for SPI members to interact with experts from different fields related to land degradation, desertification and drought, including policy-makers, scientists, CSOs, development agencies and other science-policy panels and bodies. She stressed that representatives from the media arena have been invited as well as this should further support raising awareness of the causes and socio-economic impacts of the degradation of natural resources and the need for integrated planning and implementation of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) initiatives at country level to achieve sustainable development.