UPCOMING GLF DIGITAL SUMMIT: Large scale restoration of agroecosystems – Opportunities and Challenges of participatory monitoring

The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) is a movement dedicated to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement, putting communities first in addressing landscape-level issues. With science and traditional knowledge at the core, we are presenting the digital summit “Large scale restoration of agroecosystems – Opportunities and Challenges of participatory monitoring”.

Restoration practices must be designed in environmentally, socially and economically efficient ways in order to enhance long term farmer adoption. Putting together farmers’ experiences and scientific knowledge through participatory research and monitoring can help to find the most feasible solutions to restore degraded lands and develop resilient agroecosystems. The benefits of stakeholder engagement are multiple, but can lead also to some challenges.

In this Digital Summit, we will present three case studies in which different participatory research and monitoring approaches and methods were used to foster agro-ecosystem restoration.

  1. African thickets and forests
  2. Mediterranean drylands in Spain
  3. Subtropical Atlantic rainforest in Brazil

The webinar will take place on Tuesday 8th of October 2019 from 11am to 12pm CEST.

For more info and registration check this link.

This Digital Summit is hosted by GLF and initiated by J. de Vente and R. Lujan Soto from as a partner in the ENABLE consortium and supported by a research grant from Fundación la Caixa to RLS (LCF/BQ/ES17/11600008).

DIGITAL SUMMIT: From river to coast – Collaboration to restore coastal and rural areas

GLF (Global Landscapes Forum) Digital Summits are conversations with global leaders, experts and influencers on the world’s most pressing issues. Join us for this Digital Summit, which we will address the potential benefits, limitations and challenges of participatory modelling as a methodology to co-create scenarios promoting coastal-rural synergies.

Participatory approaches to map and model system dynamics can help to create mutual understanding of appropriate collective action for ecosystem restoration initiatives. But in contexts with active resource or value system conflicts, this can be a challenging task.

In particular, three examples of ongoing projects in Spain, India, and Portugal will be presented: 1) the Mar Menor coastal lagoon and its contributing catchment area, as part of the COASTAL project; and 2) the Ria de Aveiro coastal lagoon and Lower Vouga River Natura2000 sites and 3) A project with farmers about groundwater management in India.

Update: You can now watch the recording in the following link!

This Digital Summit is hosted by GLF and initiated by J. de Vente and J. Martínez-López as partner in the  ENABLE consortium and COASTAL project.

New MOOC on Business Model Innovation for Sustainable Landscape Restoration

You can now subscribe and start our second Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Business Model Innovation for Sustainable Landscape Restoration. We developed this MOOC with our partners from the European Network for the Advancement of Business and Landscape Education (ENABLE).

The course is launched today, 14 February, and is open for all and free of charge. This is the second MOOC co-created by the ENABLE consortium members. It builds upon ENABLE’s first MOOC, which offered comprehensive knowledge of landscape degradation and restoration from the perspectives of natural sciences, economics and business administration.

This new MOOC is transdisciplinary, designed for environmental and business students, professionals, as well as anyone with an interest in landscape restoration based on sustainable business models. The course takes a partnership approach to take on the challenge of large-scale landscape restoration, reflecting the interconnectedness of ecology, society and economy in landscape management – supporting wellbeing of people and the planet.

This eight-week online course aims to equip learners with practical business tools to restore landscapes. In the course, participants are encouraged to go through the business model innovation process in small groups of their choice, based on a common interest. The course is designed in three phases that move the participants from ideas towards the successful implementation of a new business model for sustainable landscape restoration based on four different returns: return of natural and social capital, return of inspiration and return of financial capital. Each step of the process is illustrated with three real-life cases of landscape restoration to show how the theory looks in practice. These cases are: a case about crop diversification and low input farming in Spain; a large-scale woodland restoration case in Iceland; and a case about the challenges of recovering from forest fires in Portugal.

Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two-fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change (IPBES). But there’s a huge potential for restoring landscapes: around two billion hectares of land, about two times the size of China, can be restored. This free online course aims to equip learners from environmental, business or other backgrounds with practical business tools to restore landscapes.

You can now start the course and work on solutions for landscape restoration – one of the biggest challenge of our time. For more information, watch the trailer and see the ENABLE website, and its Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages. You can register for the course here.

ENABLE is a strategic partnership of organizations in the private, public and non-profit sector, and is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. The partnership is led by Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) and consists of the Spanish National Research Council (CEBAS-CSIC), Commonland, United Nations University Land Restoration Training Programme (UNU-LRT), and Nova School of Business and Economics.

Fieldwork in the Turrilla catchment

We have made a short video about our activities in one of our field locations. In the Turrilla catchment we do research on the dynamics of water and sediment. The video shows some of the tasks we perform at this field site. Enjoy!