Other meetings & events

This session was dedicated to the presentation of the Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems that had been developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), known as the Special Report on Climate Change and Land. This Special Report was approved and accepted at the 50th Session of the IPCC held from 2 to 7 August 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland.

In this session, seven presenters delivered 3-minute overview talks on a wide range of topics related to enhancing the enabling environment for LDN (see below). The presenters delivered key messages and then posed a key question to the audience. The audience was then asked to form groups of 5-6 members. These groups then received one key question on a note card and were asked to discuss and report back on their question. The small groups were so engaged in their discussions and reporting back their results that we allocated additional time to this session. We were able to give small groups the opportunity to report on their discussion to the broader audience.

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.