The World Agroforestry Centre invites you to a Science Seminar titled Investing for Sustainable Agricultural Landscapes, What Have We Learned?, on Wednesday 15 March 2017, from 1100-1230hrs (East Africa time). You can view the seminar live via www.worldagroforestry.org/livestream

Presenter: Dr. Sara J. Scherr, President and CEO of the international non-profit EcoAgriculture Partners

Host: Dr. Tony Simons

Where: World Agroforestry Centre Conference Hall

In the past decade, there has been remarkable growth around the world in public, civic and increasingly private investment for sustainable agricultural landscapes. These include both enabling investments to support landscape partnerships, incentive systems and institutions; and asset investments in sustainable agriculture, forestry, green industry and infrastructure, natural resource restoration, and renewable energy that are coordinated to achieve landscape-level impacts. 

Formation of most new landscape partnerships has been sparked by local realities of natural resource scarcity, degradation and competition that cannot be effectively addressed by inpidual resource managers or sectoral institutions on their own.  But there have been major policy drivers from international environment and sustainable development commitments.

This seminar will assess current trends in landscape investment, key challenges and innovations underway to address them. The discussion will draw on findings from surveys of 420 agricultural landscape initiatives around the world and studies of integrated landscape investment. It will also look at extensive consultations with landscape program leaders, businesses and financiers undertaken by EcoAgriculture and partners in the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative. Priority actions to strengthen the scale and effectiveness of agricultural landscape investment will be proposed.

Dr. Sara J. Scherr is the President and CEO of the international non-profit EcoAgriculture Partners. She co-founded the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature. She also serves on the boards of Bioversity International-US, Solutions from the Land, Food Tank, the Platform for Agrobiopersity Research, and the IDH Initiative for Sustainable Landscapes (ISLA). She served on the Board of the World Agroforestry Centre from 2003-2008. An agricultural and resource economist, she previously worked at Forest Trends, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the World Agroforestry Centre and lectured at the University of Maryland-College Park. She was also a member of the Millennium Project’s Hunger Task Force.

For further details on the seminar, kindly contact ICRAF-Seminars@cgiar.org or E.M.Kariuki@cgiar.org