IN joint efforts to a new demand-responsive technical facility to help countries accelerate forest landscape restoration, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is partnering with like-minded organisations on a fresh approach to help Tanzania and other countries to implement restoration through the creation of the Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) Implementation Hub.
FLR is a new partnership among between WWF, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and World Resources Institute (WRI), in consultation with and supported by the German Government (BMU-IKI).
Preparations for the FLR Hub are now under way, according to WWF representative Dr Severing Kalonga. Dr Kalonga was speaking recently in Dodoma, at the Stakeholders workshop on development of the FLR implementation Hub in Tanzania.
The WWF representative said that the hub will be demand-responsive to the country, local stakeholders, and partners seeking to overcome FLR bottlenecks and build on success factors to accelerate and scale FLR implementation.
“It aims to generate climate and biodiversity benefits and achieve human well-being,” he noted.
The selected six countries of implementation are Brazil, Colombia, Madagascar, Peru, Tanzania, and Uganda, according to him. He told participants at the workshop that the five-year programme (2020-2025) will be valued at a total volume of 20,260,000 EUR.
In this project, IUCN is the project lead, with WRI and WWF as other implementing partners. According to Dr Kalonga, the project steering group is comprised of representatives of all three organisations and that WWF is a technical lead on work package three—Private Sector Mobilisation and Engagement.
“Also, WWF is lead facilitator on country preparation including the appraisal missions for Columbia and Tanzania while WRI is for Brazil and Peru while IUCN is for Uganda and Madagascar,” he noted.
WWF believes that making landscape restoration a reality and ensuring its long-term success is a complex task with many moving parts. To usher restoration toward action, many governments would benefit from additional technical know-how.
Therefore, the FLR Hub will catalyse and facilitate action on-the-ground in selected countries by working with their governments, companies and others who have clear land management responsibilities.
In addition to unblocking bottlenecks within established national restoration processes, and in order to accelerate emerging and promising country-driven opportunities, the hub will operate a demand-driven rapid response mechanism that takes advantage of strategic opportunities to accelerate implementation.