Landscape approaches for mountain community sustainable development in a time of climate change: Policy consultation and South-South exchange workshop
The workshop on “Landscape approaches for mountain community sustainable development in a time of climate change: Policy consultation and South-South exchange” was organised by the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP, China), Asociación ANDES (Peru) and IIED, on 19-22 May 2016, in Lijiang and the Stone Village, Yunnan, China. The workshop brought together different stakeholders from China, Peru, the Albertine Rift region in Africa and UN agencies to explore the role of different community-led landscape approaches in agrobiodiversity conservation, climate resilience, with a particular focus on mountains. Community-led landscape approaches play a critical role in poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and climate resilience, and hence in achieving the SDGs, Aichi Targets and implementation of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. Mountains face multiple challenges, for example climate change, mining, deforestation and intensive monocultures. Improving livelihoods and sustaining ecosystem services requires fostering innovation, knowledge exchange and co-learning across mountain regions, to scale out successful ‘seeds of innovation’. Community-managed landscapes are a low cost and effective tool for conserving biodiversity and ecosystems, provided they are managed through self-governing local institutions, and focus on strengthening culture as well as markets. This report (PDF) presents the results of the workshop. An important next step that was identified includes that a common set of indicators for biocultural heritage landscapes/territories should be developed, that can be used to measure how communities are being supported, ensure that communities are being rewarded by initiatives, and that communities can use to establish biocultural landscapes.