Side Event: Combatting climate change through an informed landscape management strategy: optimization of land-use values for resilient communities, Lebanon Restoration Initiative.

In Lebanon, afforestation has been the primary focus to combat desertification and achieve/respond to national restoration goals. Although afforestation projects implicitly englobe results that contribute to the combat against climate change, most of these projects were not designed to explicitly implement mitigation and adaptation measures.

Additionally, while carbon sequestration in Mediterranean forests’ ecosystems (resulting among others from these afforestation efforts) is a well-rehearsed service that responds to the Paris Agreement targets, these latter ecosystems present a wider range of services that are yet to be well-defined in terms of their contribution to strengthen the resilience of people to climate change. Moreover, in the last few years, efforts to restore degraded lands in Lebanon went beyond afforestation to cover a wider approach of landscape restoration. The latter includes, among others, areas such as forest conservation and management, rangeland management and quarry restoration. Like forest ecosystems, the restored/and or managed ecosystems that are tackled by these landscape restoration projects present services which associations to mitigation and adaptation targets are not adequately explored.

Objectives

• Review the direct measures underlined under multiple landscape restoration interventions that can be directly translated to mitigation and/ or adaptation targets

• Explore the use of ecosystem services valuation on a national and local level as a holistic approach to:

  A- Inform the choice of the optimal land use types and restoration intervention types that increase people’ resilience to climate change

  B- Pave the way to design payment for ecosystem services that reinforce mitigation and adaptation capabilities on a national and local level