WOCAT

The sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the UNCCD will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from 2-13 December 2024. The UNCCD is the world’s foremost platform for governments, businesses and civil society to come together and to discuss present-day challenges and chart a sustainable future for land. This year's COP will coincide with the Convention's 30th anniversary. WOCAT and partners will be present and will be announcing their contributions to sessions and side events soon. Stay tuned!

The 2nd Dryland Summer School was held at CIFOR-ICRAF campus, Nairobi, Kenya. This year's theme was “Monitoring Restoration in Agrosilvopastoral Systems for Sustainability and Ecosystem Services.” FAO and key partners have organized the Summer School and trained 27 participants from 15 countries for resilient drylands and transformative land management. Like last year, WOCAT was a key partner at the event and was represented by Lehman Lindeque from South Africa. During the session on introducing Participatory Monitoring Systems, Lehman introduced the SLM Progress Calculator (SLM PC) to the participants. The SLM PC is a unique monitoring tool to measure the progress and impact of agroecological and environmental rehabilitation and development-related projects.

As an accredited UNCCD CSO, WOCAT is leading the Working Group Compile Good Practices from CSOs to Combat Desertification. After a training on how to document SLM practices with the WOCAT questionnaires, the CSO will document their best practices until end of November. The documented practices will then be disseminated via social media, presented in the WOCAT Pavilion at the UNCCD COP16 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and also featured in the ECO daily bulletin at COP16.

In the framework of the ‘Community-based Sustainable Land and Forest Management in Afghanistan’ implemented since 2018 around 30 participants joined the training on ‘ Sustainable Land and Forest management (SLM and SFM) assessment and documentation using World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) and Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA) tools in Afghanistan’. The project aims to promote SLM and SFM practices in Afghanistan for promoting rangeland productivity, biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation in 5 provinces. The training was held online on 16 and 17 September 2024 and will be followed by field days for hands-on assessment and documentation of SLM good practices to combat land degradation.

The report "Carbon Farming in Kazakhstan: Unlocking an Opportunity" to which WOCAT collaborated, has been published.
The report provides a comprehensive overview of the opportunities and challenges related to carbon farming and trading in Kazakhstan and, more broadly, on Central Asian drylands.

From 29 July to 2 August, researchers from CDE-WOCAT joined over 100 environmental experts from 10 African countries at the Second FAO GEF-7 Dryland Sustainable Landscapes Impact Program (DSL-IP) Southern Africa Stakeholders Workshop in Blantyre, Malawi. Their discussions, group work, and presentations focused, among other things, on SLM practices and Integrated Land Use Planning (ILUP) to achieve Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN). An inspiring field day highlighted the benefits of intercropping pigeon peas and maize, showcasing effective SLM measures for the region.