By promoting climate-smart landscapes, the Working Landscapes programme will contribute to climate change mitigation, adaptation, improved livelihoods and environmental integrity, which are crucial to achieving the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Forests and trees in well-managed landscapes have the potential to contribute significantly to climate change mitigation and adaptation, while supporting people’s livelihoods and sustaining agricultural value chains.
The ‘Forests for a Just Future’ programme of the Green Livelihoods Alliance (GLA) will contribute to the protection of tropical forests and the people who directly depend on those forests. With partner organisations in Africa, South East Asia and South America the GLA works to govern tropical forests in a sustainable and inclusive way.
By promoting a landscape approach for fire management, the Fire-Smart Lanscape Governance Programme as part of the Working Landscapes programme will contribute to establish fire-smart landscape management. This should result in reduced or eliminated risk of extreme wildfire events for the benefits of sustainable use of forest and trees, contributing to climate-smart landscapes.
Developing innovative finance for climate action using a landscape approach
Many landscapes in the global south are small-scale mosaics of different vegetation types and land uses, including homesteads, crop fields, forests and agroforests . They are of vital importance for local livelihoods, nature and biodiversity conservation and climate change resilience. It is in such diverse landscapes—often on farms smaller than five hectares—that nearly half of the world’s food is produced. However, these smallholder producers tend to struggle to get access finance to improve or scale up their businesses. There may be credit providers in the landscape, but they are often reluctant to provide loans to small entrepreneurs in the land use sector as it is considered risky, and pay-back periods tend to be longer than normal lending policies allow for.