Learning to Manage Land Sustainably with Climate Change Mitigation Co-benefits: Lessons from the Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change Mitigation Co-benefits (SLM-CCMC) Project

Sustainable land management (SLM) is crucial to many ecosystem services. However, SLM is not normally aimed at climate change mitigation, meaning these co-benefits are often underestimated or go unreported. The Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change Mitigation Co-benefits (SLM-CCMC) project used and improved on carbon and greenhouse gas accounting tools to make it easier for SLM practitioners to estimate the climate change mitigation co-benefits of sustainable land management activities. This report presents the results from this Global Environment Facility (GEF) project which ran from 2016 - 2020. It was funded under the Land Degradation portfolio and built on the achievements of two previous GEF projects1. One of the main achievements of the project was the linkage of the Carbon Benefits Project (CBP) tools for greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting to the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT – a database of sustainable land management practices). This approach saves users time and effort, allowing them to import SLM technologies into the CBP tools and estimate how they contribute to climate change mitigation. It also paves the way for future a global database of carbon friendly land management practices.

Lead Authors: Eleanor Milne and Rachel Kosse

Contributing Authors: Keith Paustian, Mark Easter, Ben Sutton, Guhan Dheenadayalan-Sivakami, Kevin Brown, Nick Young, Paul Evangelista, Maarten Kappelle, Victoria Luque Panadero, Sofia Mendez, Hanspeter Liniger, Tatenda Lemann Kurt Gerber, Jeffrey Herrick, Meghan Mize, Ademola Braimoh, Yuxuan Zhao, Anass Toudert, Martial Bernoux, Maylina St-Louis, Manar Abdelmagied, Louis Bockel, Adriana Ignaciuk, George Ayaga, Kennedy Were, Lehman Lindeque, Rebecca Powell, Franciso Cuesta, Raul Galeas, Manuel Peralvo, Markos Wondie, Bekalu Bitew and Melese Bililign.