Press
release
25 November 2020
For Immediate
Release
Nominations for
prestigious UN Award Opens
Nominations
for the 2021 Land for Life Award of the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
(UNCCD) opened today. The submission of nominees
will close after two months, on 28 January
2021.
The Award recognizes
initiatives to halt, reduce and/or reverse land
degradation that have had a positive impact on
people and their land by using a holistic
approach as well as practices that address both
the environmental and social aspects of land
management.
Under the theme “Healthy Land,
Healthy Lives,” the 2021 Award will spotlight
changemakers doing innovative land restoration
and conservation that is both promoting the
well-being of communities and improving their
relationship with nature. It will reflect land
as part of the solution, as the communities
around the world recover from the COVID-19
pandemic and build back better around a social
contract for nature.
Winners will
be invited to present their projects and work at
international forums, including the Kubuqi
International Desertification Forum in China,
where the Award Ceremony will take place in
mid-2021, and at the Fifteenth session of the
Conference of the Parties to the Convention at
the end of 2021. These forums offer
winners special access to potential new funding
partners and
stakeholders.
Previous
winners include World Vision
(Australia), SEKEM (Egypt), Watershed
Organization Trust (India) and Réseau MARP
(Burkina Faso).
By winning the
prestigious award, some have expanded their
projects, secured new partnerships or been
recognized by other international and national
awards.
Mr. Tony Rinaudo, World
Vision Australia, said “The Land for
Life Award has played a significant role in
lifting the profile of a relatively obscure
intervention – Farmer Managed Natural
Regeneration (FMNR) globally, giving it wider
visibility and validating it as an effective
tool in land and tree restoration. […] Today,
FMNR is a normal part of the development lexicon
when it comes to land restoration approaches and
is considered a ‘best practice’ by many donors
and development practitioners alike.”
“So
much has awareness grown that the flagship
intervention being promoted by the Global
Evergreening Alliance, a coalition of NGOs,
conservation groups, research institutions and
professionals – is FMNR. In the seven years
since World Vision was granted the Land for Life
Award, the practice of FMNR, and individuals
promoting it, have gone onto win other
nationally and internationally significant
awards,” Mr Rinaudo said.
”In our quest
to establish a new social contract for nature
and ensure a healthier and safer future for all,
we need to promote the connection between people
and their environment, on the one hand, and
focus on innovative approaches that involve
communities, empower women and promote new
technologies on the other. In these uncertain
times where a growing number of infectious
diseases is coming through land use change, we
are searching for positive and inspiring models
that are creating healthy lives by turning
degrading land into healthy land,” says
Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary of the
UNCCD.
The Land for Life
Award also has a special China Award that
celebrates exceptional commitment to sustainable
land management in China.
Elion
Foundation is the main sponsor of the
Land for Life Programme, but leads the special
China Award together with the National Forestry
and Grassland Administration, Ministry of
Science and Technology, and Provincial
Governmental of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous
Region.
Additional Quotes from
Previous Winners:
Ms. Marcella
D’Souza, WOTR Centre for Resilience Studies
(W-CReS): "The L4L Award
helped us connect and engage with the ELD
Secretariat at the GIZ based out of Bonn, who we
had met at Kubuqi. This resulted in a new
project on Economic Valuation of
regenerating degraded lands through Watershed
Development, implemented by our research unit -
the WOTR Centre for Resilience Studies (W-CReS).
In addition, the Award and the exposure it
provided us helped transition our
watershed-focussed interventions to a more
holistic ecosystems-based approach targeted at
building adaptive capacities and resilience of
rural communities to climate and non-climate
risks. This led to another partnership and
project with the ambition to develop a state
level "Roadmap for Ecosystems-based Adaptation"
which involves multi-stakeholder and
multi-sectoral engagement and collaboration
across scales."
Mr. Mathieu
Ouédraogo, Réseau MARP: “Winning the Land
for Life Award is certainly a great honor, but
above all a major opportunity. This distinction
led the communities we work with to be more
thorough in the actions they carry out daily,
focusing on tangible results. Quantitatively, we
have doubled our objective in terms of
achievements in the field, thanks to the
worldwide recognition of our
efforts.”
Mr. Awadalla Hamid,
Practical Action Sudan: “The award has
definitely a great impact on the project and the
life of the people of Darfur, as we managed to
secure an additional fund for a second phase of
the same project, 10M Euros
from the European Union to support more families
in Wadi ElKu project area, and to cover
additional 180km along the Wadi
ElKu Catchment in North Darfur.”
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Notes to
Editors
For further
information regarding the rules and criteria,
visit the Land
for Life Award
webpage.
Contact
person : Caroline Galipeau, Coordinator
of the Land for Life Programme, cgal...@unccd.int
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The United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
(UNCCD) is an international agreement on good
land stewardship. Through partnerships, the
Convention’s 197 Parties set up robust systems
to manage land degradation and drought promptly
and effectively. Good land stewardship based on
a sound policy and science helps integrate and
accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable
Development Goals, builds resilience to climate
change and prevents biodiversity loss. Land also
plays a key role in the prevention,
preparedness, response, and recovery phases of
the COVID-19 pandemic, securing rural
livelihoods and creating green jobs, supporting
community resilience and maintaining the
sustainable delivery of ecosystem
services. | | |
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Sent: Wednesday, November 25,
2020 9:27 PM
Subject: Press Release:
Nominations for prestigious UN Award Opens
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