Global Livelihoods and Landscape Recovery Platform (GALLOP) initiative

The CHALLENGE

To achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), governments, NGOs, and communities need to implement systemic interventions and establish a support structure. This requires policy, institutional, finance, and CSR reform. It is essential to prioritize large-scale landscape and biodiversity recovery to ensure equitable human development and the future availability of natural resources. One way to accomplish this is by offering innovative livelihood options in the green economy and commercial supply chains. This approach will contribute to reversing landscape degradation and climate change while supporting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)! This aligns with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 (Refer to UN resolution A/RES/73/284).

Initiative Build Up and Design

Being a Conservation Catalyst and Goodwill Ambassador to Rajasthan’s Project Tiger was an enriching experience. This was a decadal multi-million-dollar conservation, and landscape transformation initiative. It was funded by the government – for voluntary village relocation of forest people to civil society. The experience brought about many perspectives, amongst them – community development, landscape regeneration, and bio-diversity proliferation. This directly leads to an improvement in the region’s microclimate (reduced climate impacts) and human development index. This benefitted over 1,600 families / 6,000+ individuals in their progress. It afforded precious insights into sustainable development mechanisms that help improve local SDGs and NDCs. It provided communities with positive realizations and experiences in their journey toward a better future. A focus on human progress initially was critical to helping natural recovery across vast areas of the national park’s 1300 sq. km. In time, subsequent ground interventions aided flora, fauna, and biodiversity restoration via forest and landscape restoration (FLR). All this ultimately doubled the state’s tiger numbers due to an increase in the quality of habitat, and prey base. The program was structured and executed as a multi-stakeholder partnership across national and state governmental institutions, revenue, and forest departments while working with communities /civil society. This was a perfect case of Integrated Landscape Management (ILM). By implementing structured governance, and control mechanisms to provide grants, facilities, and infrastructure to these relocated families their development index has steadily improved over time. 

Also as part of the Central India Landscape Symposium discussing landscape-related issues, with a background in national policy reform, the wish to influence policy in ILM and then explore avenues to bring in private stakeholders and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) became an evolving focus. The outcome of this, then prior experience across corporate, non-government, and government gave me the motivation to develop a program for Livelihood and Landscape Recovery Platform, and hence this Initiative – G.A.L.L.O.P.

The initiative’s goal is to assimilate thinking and expand it into larger pre-existing programs to scale up Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs). This helps ILM, SDGs, and NDCs by defining standards, institutional design, policy, and systemic models/frameworks to help the Bonn Challenge and beyond. To emphasize the scale of restoration required globally today – the Bonn challenge targets landscape restoration across 350m ha by 2030, but commitments as of mid-2022 are at 210m ha!! UNCCD targets global restoration needs at about 5 billion ha by 2050. It is apparent, that we still have ways to go!!! Therefore global agencies and national governments have a key role to play in deploying national and sub-national policy frameworks to achieve SDGs and NDCs toward the UN’s 2030 agenda and 2050 goal. Even as we race ahead to achieve the Bonn challenge – our growth trajectory on Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) needs to scale over 14 times the challenge’s target!! We intend to pull evidence together and come up with model approaches to policy frameworks, and institutional design. All this across multiple sectors with good governance, while removing redundancies and counter-productive manifestations in current policy. Only then can ILM and Landscape and Seascape partnerships (LPs) ensure participation of the community, private stakeholders, and Corporate Social Responsibility at scale.

Way Forward

The DNA of the initiative itself is meant to be collaborative. It will need best-practice evolution and approach/model validation within existing landscape programs. Examples of such programs are The Restoration Initiative by Global Environment Facility and others (GEF, FAO, IUCN, UNEP), WRI’s Restoration Initiative, and The 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion people convened by EcoAgriculture Partners. Since late 2020, GALLOP along with EcoAgriculture Partners, Cornell, and Columbia Universities, has been instrumental as a team in outreach to take this forward with multiple stakeholders towards a policy brief and white paper. The next steps would need case study assessments of successful government interventions in the policy arena to facilitate building public policy models, and templates. Once this is achieved, it could then be reviewed against any future policy framework plan by a national or sub-national government. Such practices need to be presented to a consortium of land restoration organizations, LPs. Thereafter detailed review/feedback with grant-funding foundations, that have project funding experience to develop policy and program models. Post subsequent deliberations and fine-tuning on all aspects, it can then be seeded towards an ILM BEST PRACTICE to governments/NGOs/CSR for policy inclusion. Presentations to international bodies like the GEF, USAID, UNDP, UNEP, FAO, IUCN, UN HLPF on SDGs, World Bank, and other organizations would aid validation and course corrections. Holistic and inclusive exercises for development and restoration can synergize us toward achieving targets set via world agencies.

Only once LPs, communities, and government agencies start adopting these best practices over the next decade, impacts and gains can be realized. We need to achieve a trinity of – 1. Long-term support by the national and territorial governments in policy, institutions, finance, and other requirements, 2. Support structures and outreach by local governments for predefined KPIs on policy templates, and 3. Leadership development within communities at the ground level. Working for landscape recovery and sustainability ensuring bottom-up participation towards their wellness and livelihood. (This is missing today).

The GALLOP initiative intends to specifically work towards building policy approaches and models that can evolve to illustrate subtleties for multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as best practices that can be adopted by LPs and communities alike.

These ‘best practices can then be rolled out across different layers of institutions to bring a semblance to activities while encouraging voluntary leadership at the community level. This will allow for bespoke in-situ solutions, and customizations based on landscape, community competency, and climatic factors. The journey should involve reliance on the best techniques, organic methods, a digital backbone, and institutionalizing patterns. Agri-tech can then be used to network and create market supply chains to bring fair economic gains to the communities. In time, when this sustains, landscapes recover to benefit communities and rebuild their earthly relationships that have been lost.

There are challenges to these bottom-up approaches as compared to the traditional top-down sectoral outlays by governments as highlighted in the white paper. But we have seen seeds of success and need to tread that path gathering evidence and developing policy models in a POLICY LAB (See concept note).

Can the GALLOP initiative’s thinking and participative approach to policy and CSR/ESG be a way forward? A key approach is to advance the ILM agenda via LPs, and livelihoods in the green economy via bottom-up decision-making structures in Policy. While the outcome remains to be seen, this is the most critical work at hand for all of us as global citizens if we are to ensure the future of our planet and its people – our next generations …!

Executive Summary ↓

The 2011 Bonn Challenge was a historic decision for global landscape restoration. As a result, a lot of excellent initiatives have been underway to help restore millions of hectares of land. In the past decade, there has been some excellent work and the landscape collaborations now wish to scale efforts not on a linear scale but at a multiple of hundreds. This is an encouraging development.

An initiative of such complexity involves multiple stakeholders where each gets their core competencies to the table and after building collaborations the team can then make a difference to the landscape over time. Degradation of landscapes also reduces their ability to support communities and results in them migrating away to other areas in search of better living conditions. This creates double imbalances; in that it removes the human ability to positively influence the landscape at the first location and creates excess pressure at the second. In addition to loss of natural capital, both locations lose social capital, financial capital, and motivation. Displaced communities and degraded landscapes face different kinds of challenges thereafter in quality of life and ability to regenerate, thereby reducing their SDGs.

If we can work on a combined solution in a way that communities can directly work to recover their landscapes and prosper, it may sound like a utopian dream. The good thing is a lot of it is happening in places the world over and if we can help converge both of these in each landscape initiative that will be the best thing to support the Bonn Challenge.

This platform initiative is precisely geared to help achieve that – develop policy models that bring convergence and collaboration across stakeholders and then add scale to the overall operation. It’s a global initiative but the principles can be applied anywhere by factoring in local conditions. Our initial proposal is to begin with a few landscapes. Then with leanings there, we help bring true wellness to landscapes everywhere by the use of this strategy and approach. Therefore helping communities build their livelihoods via landscape restoration is an obvious choice for stakeholders. i.e. Achieve SDGs by working towards NDCs. Herein we propose the setup where the key is community empowerment via ILM to ensure sustainable landscape benefits towards their long-term well-being.

As shown in the Traditional Operating Model (TOM) schematic, the process starts by first understanding and building an approach to bolster communities’ ability to help restore their landscape. Thereafter bringing in various implementation partners to help it scale. The methodology works bottom-up by addressing challenges and constraints related to the landscape and village communities. Any support and assistance required that is outside their purview or ability cascade up to the appropriate stakeholder for suitable intervention. All this via systemic recommendations at each level finally ending in policy suggestions. This requires making the appropriate socio-political, economic, and business case decisions toward an SDG / NDC agenda. The key differentiation of the approach being 

• working with the local governments for convergence of all existing schemes and capital outlays available for community and landscape benefits,
• community empowerment via the above and add further scale in the landscapes,
• bring in private CSR and implementing agencies to liaison with all stakeholders to help the community run their landscape operation,
• the above three ensure effective ROI and maximum returns to communities,
• they can then involve other science and institutional partners to help address gaps toward a larger and long-term execution strategy,
• essentially if all the above is left to the community only, chances of success are difficult given the challenges and the length of time such an effort takes to produce results,
• if an initiative is done without private CSR or technical /scientific partner involvement the burden on the local government gets too huge. Then the applicability and scale of execution become difficult to achieve,
• all this must be executed in a structured manner via access to a knowledgebase,
• access to appropriate systems is required for spatial information and digital backbone,

All this may seem complex, but the KEY is to get started with mitigation, adaptation, and large-scale land restoration (and agriculture improvements) via local communities themselves for the multiple benefits it offers to SDGs & NDCs. If this can be supported via government policy, CSR adaptation & funding, private enterprise, and civil society inclusion it will be a big step to help bring scale to Climate adaptation and land restoration directly helping SDGs. Once this is underway other facets of sustainable development and ILM can be undertaken for community benefit toward the 2030 agenda and 2050 goal. Innovations in policy, institutions, and financing for all these will be important!!

Covid-19 is affecting rural and marginal communities badly and that adds to our resolve to move forward quickly. As the sayings go – ‘All good things start small‘ & ‘All good things take time! The key is to come together, get all our best practices together, and COLLABORATE! The outcome remains to be seen!