Stories

At just 20 years old, Kehkashan is already a global influencer, environmentalist, TEDx Speaker, social enterprise innovator and author. In 2012, she founded the Green Hope Foundation to provide a platform for engagement and empowerment of children and youth, especially those representing vulnerable groups, and turn them into changemakers who address the sustainability issues at a local level. Today, the foundation has 2060 members in 16 countries  across Middle East, India, Brazil, USA, Canada, Europe and South East Asia. Empowering young people is Kehkashan's passion, and she spends a lot of time personally training and guiding many of them through workshops on mangrove conservation and tree planting. Kehkashan is a tireless civil society advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals and holds leadership positions in several organizations.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kehkashan continues her advocacy work through webinars and the #WomenImpactingTheWorld series. You can find her on: Facebook: @greenhopeyouth.greenhopefoundation  Twitter: @KehkashanBasu / @GreenHopeYouth Instagram: @kehkashan5basu / @greenhopefoundation

Patricia Kombo is a young social entrepreneur and a climate activist from Kenya. She studied journalism at Moi University and is known for her tree planting activities, especially her nonprofit PaTree Initiative that planted over 10,000 trees as of 2020. She is actively engaging school students in tree planting and nature conservation and strongly believes in educating them on the benefits of sustainable living. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Patricia raised 10 000 saplings from indigenous seeds in her nursery. Working with her community, she set up kitchen gardens and gave trainings on sustainable farming and land conservation to help achieve zero hunger, eliminate poverty and promote gender equality. Find Patricia on: Facebook: @patreeinitiative Twitter: @patriciakombo  Instagram: @pattykomboh

Senegalese singer and UNCCD Land Ambassador Baaba Maal believes that the future of Africa is in the hands of the youth. He is actively supporting the new narrative on the Sahel as the region of opportunities, rich in traditional culture and with a large potential for development in the management of natural resources as well as opportunities for youth, since close to two thirds of the population is under 35 years old. Through his concerts and social engagement, Baaba Maal uses the magic of his voice to bring people together and empower them to build a peaceful and prosperous future on land, harnessing the potential of the African traditions and new technologies. Read more: UNCCD Land Ambassadors Land and youth  

Statement by UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw: All of our planet’s inhabitants – humanity, and all wildlife species – require water to survive. We learn very young that life cannot exist without water. Yet over 2 billion people still lack access to safe water today. This year’s World Water Day celebrates the theme ‘Valuing water.’ This fundamental need has enormous and complex value for our societies, households, food, culture, health, education, economics and the sustainability of our environment. Global water use has increased sixfold over the past 100 years, driven by intensive agriculture and population growth. The demand for water just in food production may reach 13 trillion cubic metres annually by 2050 – 3.5 times greater than the total human use today. The importance of water for land is obvious: humanity’s relentless production and consumption relies heavily on water use and is a prime cause of desertification and land degradation. In a warming world beset by weather extremes, droughts will become more common, more intense, and more prolonged in many places – including places already at the margins of habitability. Drought and desertification are not just problems for the global South. We already see impacts, and land degradation, in highly productive and populated parts of the developed world – including California, Spain and Australia. Land degradation and desertification reduce evapotranspiration, disrupting regional rainfall patterns. In contrast, healthy land promotes consistent seasonal and annual rainfall and aids flood mitigation, soil health and aquifer recharge, helping to bring back landscapes from the brink. The UNCCD’s Drought Initiative is working globally to support our Parties to develop drought preparedness systems, spearheading regional efforts to reduce drought vulnerability and risk. Our Drought toolbox provides resources to support actions that aim to boost the resilience of people and ecosystems. Land restoration is a vital ally to World Water Day. As we celebrate today, let’s remember that we must value water and land equally as part of the same challenge – to build a better, more equal, healthier planet post COVID-19.

Statement by UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw: This year’s International Day of Forests theme of ‘Forest restoration: a path to recovery and well-being’ emphasizes the role forests must play in building a better, heathier and more equitable world as we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.  We need forests to absorb our emitted carbon dioxide, to stabilize rainfall patterns, lower temperatures, and to hold back desertification. Yet, we continue to destroy them: an alarming fifty million hectares of forests have been lost between 2015 and 2020. Research suggests tree mortality in some forests has doubled in recent decades as a result of a drying climate and chronic anthropogenic disturbance. Ensuring that forests don’t just survive but thrive is a cornerstone of the UNCCD’s mandate to achieve land degradation neutrality. The seedlings and saplings we plant today will support our well-being for generations to come.  Africa’s Great Green Wall across the Sahel has the potential to transform the lives of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable people. By creating a mosaic of green and productive landscapes, it can provide stability, livelihoods and a path out of poverty. We’ll create green jobs, harnessing the Sahel’s abundant solar energy to power a future for those most at risk. We are not just planting trees –we are planting hope for the most vulnerable – women and youth.  We can restore forests and restore hope, in tandem. We can turn the economic catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic into a better, heathier and more equitable world. Forests are also threatened by human conflict. In politically unstable situations, the management of natural resources is challenging. Rapid reconstruction often neglects sustainable management of natural resources, undermining future peace. The Peace Forest Initiative, launched at UNCCD COP 14, aims to nurture collective efforts for cross-border cooperation on ecosystem restoration including forests, linking stability and peace to land degradation neutrality. This year, let us reaffirm our will to act. Seeing our forests renewed will help humanity recover better, become more resilient, and restore our planet’s health – for all our futures. Read more Forests at the heart of land degradation neutrality Great Green Wall of Africa Peace Forest Initiative

The Group on Earth Observation Land Degradation Neutrality (GEO-LDN) Initiative announced the winner of its international technology innovation competition on the development of tools to support land use planning for Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN). The team that presented the “LUP4LDN”(Land Use Planning for Land Degradation Neutrality) tool won the competition and will receive financial and technical support valued at USD 100,000 to transform their prototype into an operational and scalable tool. LUP4LDN integrates LDN into participatory land use planning via an interface that allows users to evaluate land use and land management transition scenarios, providing visual and quantitative representation of land degradation gains and losses. “LUP4LDN supports users to answer where is most crucial to focus land restoration efforts and what sustainable land management interventions are optimal and feasible ito achieve LDN” said Pythagoras Karampiperis, CEO of SCiO, and leader of the LUP4LDN team, which includes experts in agriculture, sustainable land management, land preservation and conservation, as well as users from Tunisia and Burkina Faso. On behalf of the Jury Panel, Douglas Cripe, Senior Scientific Adviser at the Group on Earth Observation Secretariat, highlighted the achievements of the winning team during an online award ceremony in the margins of UNCCD CRIC19. “Of the tools presented, the LUP4LDN tool is the most innovative and the most directly responsive to the Competition’s challenge. LUP4LDN goes beyond analyzing data –  it brings stakeholders together. It directly facilitates collaborative land use planning and the process guidance provided is applicable globally. We recognize the value of the tool in training land use planners toward embedding LDN in planning processes,” said Cripe. In his welcoming remarks, Neil Sims, Co-Chair of the GEO-LDN Initiative and Chair of the Jury Panel, expressed his satisfaction in the large turnout for the competition. “We received entries from 23 teams, with participants from 36 countries across all continents, which reflects the significance of land degradation to countries around the world. The high level of engagement for this competition also demonstrated the value of coordination efforts such as the GEO-LDN Initiative,” he added.    Other finalists included the LDN Analytics tool, developed by a team led by Vanja Westerberg, co-Founder of Altus Impact, jointly with Simon Reynolds and Luis Costa, and users from Haiti and Ghana; and the Multi-layered Land-Dynamics Tool (ML-LDT) developed by a team led by Claudio Zucca, University of Sassari, and technical implementers and users from the Republic of Korea, India and Mongolia. “We would like to thank all three finalists' teams for their outstanding efforts, their contribution toward more transparent and well-informed land use planning and management, and their commitment to solving one of the world’s greatest environmental challenges,” said the jury in its official statement. “We were very impressed by the quality and the diversity of the finalists' tools, with approaches ranging from neural networks to expert knowledge. Through the direct engagement and co-development of the tools with end users from Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, the finalists' teams created tools that have the potential to better address the specific context, behaviors and expectations of the people who will directly interact with the technology. Especially in these difficult times, the competition provided an indispensable space for innovation and collaborative action,” said the Jury. In her closing remarks, Sara Minelli, Programme Officer at the UNCCD Secretariat, invited country Parties to express their interest in supporting further development, testing and pioneering of the winning tool. On behalf of the UNCCD Science Policy Interface, which was represented in the jury panel by Nichole Berger and Peter Verburg, Minelli said: “Land use planning is the place where different land objectives come together to enhance productivity and support livelihoods, while conserving biodiversity and combating climate change. The tools developed for this competition will provide the critical step for policy makers to include LDN in land use planning. We look forward to watching how these winning solutions – will contribute to bringing a scientific understanding of LDN into land use planning practice.” For more information or to express interest in supporting further development and testing of the winning tool, please contact Ms. Sara Minelli sminelli@unccd.int, Programme Officer on Monitoring and Assessment. Learn more:  LUP4LDN tool at a glance LUP4LDN demonstration Statement of the jury GEO-LDN Competition Competition playlist on UNCCD YouTube channel GEO-LDN Initiative