Breakout Sessions

Breakout sessions are formatted as participatory workshops to emphasize learning through focused discussions, sharing skills, hands-on activities, and case studies. Descriptions can be found at the bottom of this page after the general schedule table.

 

Thursday, January 30

 

Breakout Session Descriptions

 

Thursday, January 30th

 

12:00-1:00pm

Yale Forest Forum Lunch with Dr. Ariel Lugo - Forest Health in the Anthropocene: It’s Not What You Think!

Presenter: Dr. Ariel Lugo, Director, International Institute of Tropical Forestry, USFS-USDA

Location: Rotunda, Marsh Hall, 360 Prospect Street (Google Maps)

The advent of the Anthropocene Epoch with its unpredictable environmental conditions challenges the meaning of familiar ideas such as the notion of Forest Health. Reassessing the meaning of forest health requires objective understanding of social-ecological-technological systems, a task that is proving difficult to accomplish due to entrenched normative values developed during the Holocene Epoch. It is necessary to incorporate objective science information when evaluating forests to avoid using biased forest health notions that hinder, rather than advance, forest conservation.

 

1:30-2:30pm

Pairing Cities with Forests to model forest-positive globalization: The Cities4Forests "Partner Forest" Program

Presenter: Scott Francisco, Cities4Forests, Pilot Projects Design Collective

Location: Kroon 319, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street (Google Maps)

This Workshop will be a highly collaborative session where we discuss and develop the Cities4Forest "Partner Forests" program. This international pilot program will pair up the world's leading cities with community managed tropical forests in mutually-beneficial exchanges to further conservation and restoration objectives.

 

Workshop participants will be expected to help brainstorm and develop the concept, recommend community managed forests who may be eligible to participate, as well as discuss products, cities and other organizations for partnership consideration. 

 

1:30-3:30pm

Restoration Opportunities in Cattle Ranching Landscapes: Lessons Learned from Panamá and Colombia

Presenters: Eva Garen and Alicia Calle, Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI)

Location: Sage 8A, Sage Hall, 205 Prospect Street

The goal of the breakout session is to demonstrate how the concept of Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) can incorporate strategies that are compatible with food production landscapes in the tropics. Our discussion will focus on the integration of silvopastoral systems into tropical forest landscapes at different scales and how this approach can simultaneously increase tree and forest cover and support local livelihoods. While conventional perspectives often view cattle production as being in conflict with conservation and restoration agendas, we will share research that demonstrates how and why cattle ranchers are motivated to increase tree and forest cover in their land use practices. 

 

Friday, January 30th

11:00-12:00

Restoration of What for What and for Whom?

Presenter: Dr. Ariel Lugo, Director, International Institute of Tropical Forestry, USFS-USDA

Location: Kroon 319, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street

Restoration, initially focused on degraded lands for re-establishing forest conditions and deriving a product, has evolved in the Anthropocene Epoch as an activity with multiple purposes, types of interventions, and outcomes. Two well-known and parallel approaches to restoration include early anthropogenic interventions, and succession without human intervention. A third approach involves anthropogenic intervention with succession already in progress. Not knowing, or misjudging, what needs restoration, for what reasons and purposes, and how to achieve those purposes over the long-term, results in failures, unnecessary costs, and less effective conservation. Self-design or self-organization of the biota is an underutilized conservation tool. When properly allowed to develop, self-organization is the quickest route to adaptability in the Anthropocene Epoch.

 

Restoration: Moving from Ivory Towers of Mere Commitments to Local Action

Presenter: Dr. Susan Chomba, Project Manager, Regreening Africa, ICRAF

Location: Kroon 321, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street

Description pending.

 

Restoration: Entry Point for Sustainable Peace and Security in Drylands of West Africa

Presenter: Kelechi Eleanya

Location: Kroon G01, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street

Forest Landscape Restoration is becoming an urgent priority in regions experiencing massive land degradation and desertification, especially in the drylands of west Africa. High levels of degradation in these areas have led to excessive competition for scarce environmental resources by farmers, herdsmen and other land users, making it a breeding ground for violent conflicts. This session explores opportunities to promote sustainable peace, livelihoods and human security in the region through massive restoration efforts. How can restoration of degraded lands in drylands help to restore lasting peace and security in the region? What type of land management practices would be more appropriate to make this happen? Which stakeholders need to be on the table to design and implement this new approach?

 

Global ISTF: restoring human connections to support Tropical Forest and Landscape Restoration

Presenters: Sheila Ward, Ruth Metzel, Rene Zamora, Global International Society of Tropical Foresters

Location: Sage 24, Sage Hall, 205 Prospect Street

Landscape restoration can provide one third of the solution to climate change, while building local resilience to a changing environment. To implement this solution, communities and other agents need to be at the center of the work. Through promoting local ISTF chapters for local action and connectivity among actors, the global International Society of Tropical Foresters ISTF stands to play a strong role in facilitating inclusive, site-appropriate restoration for tropical landscapes. This session will focus on how ISTF chapters can help accelerate knowledge transfer and concrete action via regional restoration ventures like Africa 100, Initiative 20x20 in Latin America, and the Plan for Forest and Landscape Restoration in the Asia-Pacific region. Using live surveys and other tools, with participants we will explore the main knowledge gaps in tropical forest restoration and identify regional activities that ISTF chapters can participate in to help to fill those gaps.

 

Saturday, February 1st

11:35-12:30

 

The Role of Tropical Forest Restoration in “bending the curve”: Brainstorm Innovative Climate Change Solutions with the Keeling Curve Prize

Presenters: Jacquelyn Francis & Ruth Metzel, Keeling Curve Prize, Global Warming Mitigation Project

Location: Kroon G01, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street

This interactive brainstorming session asks participants to put their tropical forest knowledge to work to think about the solution space for the role tropical forests can play in contributing to climate change solutions in each of the Keeling Curve Prize 2020 categories: Capture & Utilization; Energy; Finance; Social & Cultural Pathways; and Transport & Mobility. Participants will be given the chance to migrate to different groups to brainstorm ideas on climate change solutions at the intersection of tropical forest management and the topics above. Participants will think outside the box about creative solutions that may already be working in this space and under-recognized, uncover new innovative ideas that have not been considered before, and hopefully leave the session with a broader sense of the opportunities tropical forests provide for action on climate change across a wide range of categories and a better knowledge of the resources that the Keeling Curve Prize can provide to people working on climate solutions.

 

Restoring forest ecosystems and landscapes: Perspectives from the PARTNERS international restoration network, and the restoration databank

Presenter: Sarah Wilson, Cities4Forests and the PARTNERS reforestation network

Location: Kroon 319, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street

Meeting restoration goals requires combining interdisciplinary research with on-the-ground experiencing, learning, and knowledge. I present two interdisciplinary research and research-practice initiatives to inform global forest restoration efforts. Looking backward to move forward: for the past six years, the PARTNERS restoration network has brought researchers from multiple disciplines together with practitioners and policy experts to develop holistic theory and practice-oriented research for restoration. We present a set of ten key messages based on the 40+ publications produced by this network, and a meeting of experts held at the World Resources Institute in May 2018. These messages provide clear recommendations and evidence for certain elements of restoration. I will present our method for synthesizing this information, some of our key findings, significant gaps remain in linking theory and practice - and a possible way forward via our Restoration Cases databank. Many forest restoration efforts are underway around the world, but are poorly known and descriptions of past and current activities and outcomes are often incomplete and inaccessible. Each restoration case, including ‘failures’, can inform future efforts and investments. We present a framework for a tropical forest ecosystem and landscape restoration case study database. The database development will be informed by research expertise on theory and data collection, and needs and insights from practice, and designed, tested and populated through an iterative process. Based on these case studies, we will develop evidence-based guidelines and ‘leading indicators’ for effective and long-lasting restoration in different contexts and at multiple scales. We invite ISTF participants to engage with us in this endeavour.

 

Humanitarian Crises, Resource Degradation & Restoration Options, Uganda

Presenter: Paul Hatanga, Yale FES

Location: Kroon 321, Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street

In East Africa, there is a challenge of forced migration arising from conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo, Southern Sudan and Somalia. Many refugees have ended up in Uganda where the Uganda Office of Prime Minister and United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) have provided land for refugees to establish makeshift camps. A lot of these makeshifts require tree resources for construction in addition to demand for biomass energy in form of fuel wood. Currently, Uganda hosts close to 1.5 million refugees, the highest influx in Africa in the recent 5-10 years. No wonder the country has been praised for its most progressive policy in the world. However, this has come at a cost. Tree cover has significantly reduced in refugee host districts, and there is increasing pressure on forest reserves. To address these threats, NGOs such as ICRAF, GIZ, WCS, UBF etc. are implementing projects to raise public awareness, restore affected landscapes and put in place financing mechanisms among several interventions. This breakout session will present a case around Bugoma Forest Reserve, Western Uganda. I hope to generate debate on the nexus of resource degradation, restoration and humanitarian pressures, and practical options for the much-needed interventions.

 

Landscape Sustainability Index for Restoration: Monitoring impacts of restoration

Presenter: René Zamora Cristales, World Resources Institute

Location: Sage 24, Sage Hall, 205 Prospect Street

The Sustainability Index for Landscape Restoration introduced in this break-out session is a field-tested tool for measuring the impact of restoration efforts. The tool was developed by El Salvador Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (main promoters of the UN decade of Ecosystem Restoration), The World Resources Institute (WRI), The PRISMA Foundation and the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ). The Index offers easy-to-use visual metrics to display biophysical and socioeconomic indicators to measure the health of a landscape. It describes how these metrics have been used to convene dialogues among diverse stakeholders who must actively collaborate to restore land. Finally, emerging monitoring technologies (deforestation and tree cover growth) can be used to track and document the performance of the land recovery process after restoration activities and support and facilitate adaptive management in dynamic landscapes.