Forest Landscape Restoration and Global Change: From Policy to Practice

International Knowledge-Sharing Workshop

Radisson Blu Convention Centre, Kigali, Rwanda, 26-27 July 2016


The German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) has entrusted the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), FAO and Wageningen University with organizing an international knowledge-sharing workshop on “Forest Landscape Restoration and Global Change: From Policy to Practice”, to provide inputs into the High-level Bonn Challenge Ministerial Roundtable in Rwanda. 

The two-day event was organised in partnership with MINIRENA and the cross-sectoral Task Force for agriculture and natural resources with contributions from IUCN, WRI, CIFOR and various research institutions in the region.


The event brought together more than 60 experts from over 10 countries in Africa and overseas.
Our overall aim was to support political commitments with knowledge and expertise on the actual implementation of FLR.

Workshop programme

Results and message to policy makers

Workshop report


As emphasised in the high-level Bonn Challenge Meeting political commitments need to be complemented with expertise and implementation on the ground. Therefore, the Workshop sought to:

1.    Share and discuss lessons from current state of the art scientific and technical knowledge on FLR both at global and regional scales;
2.    Connect FLR experts in the region and further stimulate exchanges of information, thus providing feedback into the Bonn Challenge and AFR100 policy initiatives;
3.    Discuss challenges of current land management across the region  and impediments to sustainable land management and ecosystem functionality;
4.    And finally, to develop a plan of action in support of continuous sub-regional learning, sharing of experiences and FLR practice improvements.

To this end, a wide spectrum of issues including participatory planning, governance, institutional arrangements, regulatory frameworks, capacity development, market and finance mechanisms, as well as technical aspects of FLR operations was covered.