Initiative 20x20 calls for investment and public support to help restore lands in the LAC

Buenos Aires, Argentina – Partners of Initiative 20x20 representing governments, impact investors, companies and technical experts met to advance the alignment of policies and investments for landscape restoration across Latin America and the Caribbean. The Initiative brings together seventeen Latin American countries, which have committed to restore twenty million hectares of degraded land by 2020 as part of the goals set forth by the Bonn Challenge.

For Initiative 20x20, restoration is about recovering and maintaining the functions of the land – ecological, economic, productive, social and cultural – through sustainable systems of agroforestry, silvopasture and other land uses. It also promotes natural or assisted reforestation as well as conservation of forests and other landscapes while avoiding deforestation, since all these elements are fundamental to an integrated restoration process. This fifth annual meeting became a platform for harnessing investment and public policy to help restore lands region-wide.

During the meeting, the UNCCD invited Argentinian Secretary of Environment and Sustainable Development Rabbi Sergio Bergman to attend the upcoming COP14 in New Delhi, India, and take part in the international dialogue on the role of spiritual communities in promoting value-based approach to land stewardship. Rabbi has stated that the importance of land goes beyond economic, physical and social importance, but also holds a spiritual value, known and respected by ancestral cultures and peoples.
 

Read more:

• 20x20 Initiative
• The Bonn Challenge