Thank you Mister Chair. Distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen I am honoured to speak on behalf of more than 500 accredited CSOs to the Convention.
We express our deep gratitude to the Global Mechanism for providing the Updated report on the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund’s operationalization.
CSOs welcome the LDN Fund’s objective to achieve positive impacts in the spheres of climate, biodiversity, poverty, and gender equality and CSOs welcome the reference in the update report to the complaint and compliance mechanism for the ESMS to ensure that project-affected populations have formal ways to voice their concerns and identify and correct the causes for grievance.
However, the Updated report doesn’t provide details on how LDN Fund projects meet the impact criteria and benefit local natural ecosystems and communities.
The information available on the projects may raise concerns about these impacts, for example, the Komaza project in Kenya and Miro Forestry in Sierra Leone and Ghana are introducing large-scale monocultural timber plantations. One of the introduced tree species has been shown to have negative impacts on the ecology, lowering ground-water tables, destroying biodiversity, and negatively impacting the natural ecosystem [1].
CSOs therefore call for more information on the projects financed by the LDN fund, as well as on the lessons learned by the LDN fund on the opportunities and favorable conditions for a private sector contribution to sustainable development.
As the LDN Fund is not mentioned in the Global Mechanism’s report on the implementation of the LDN, CSOs invite countries to further consider the opportunity that the fund can present to support initiatives built on bottom-up approaches, and contributing to the achievement of the National LDN targets.
Dear Mr. Chair, distinguished Delegates, we call for robust alliance and partnership for avoiding and reducing land degradation as well as restoring degraded lands. We trust that shared information on experiences and lessons learned will help the Parties to adequately consider and reflect the impact of the LDN Fund to create a more potent synergy between policies and concrete actions for land and communities.
Thank You.
[1] Zhang, Dj., Zhang, J., Yang, Wq. et al. Potential allelopathic effect of Eucalyptus grandis across a range of plantation ages. Ecol Res 25, 13–23 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-009-0627-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11284-009-0627-0?shared-article-renderer)
