Kenya National Landscape Restoration Scaling Conference

Context

Kenya has made major commitments to international agreements on land restoration, climate change, and biodiversity, because there is widespread appreciation among the leadership and citizenry that it is important to address these challenges. Landscape restoration can reverse the degradation processes on farmlands, communal grazing lands, and forestlands, and it has become the focus of major attention.

 The Kenyan government pledged to restore 5.1 million hectares of degraded land in Kenya by 2030 under the African Forest and Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) and Bonn Challenge.  In addition,  the 2010 Constitution of Kenya emphasizes the need for achieving and maintaining at least 10% tree cover in the country’s land area.

 There are numerous efforts being undertaken, including in the environment, forestry, grazing management, conservation, and agriculture spaces towards restoration in the country. They are being spearheaded by multiple stakeholders. But many of these efforts remain fragmented and could benefit greatly from pursuing greater synergies.

 This virtual conference will focus on accelerating the momentum of landscape restoration in Kenya by joining up the multiple dimensions of the efforts. It will reflect upon and celebrate the many achievements in the restoration space and identify how these can be amplified. It will foster better synergies between initiatives, agree on areas for coordinated implementation and monitoring, and create mechanisms that will better harness the collective strengths of government with nongovernment organizations, research, and the private sector, to move collectively towards addressing the national challenges and meeting the commitments.