Investing in Climate Change Adaptation through Agroecological Landscape Restoration

Client: ADB   |   Partners: ICRAF, CEDAC   |   Duration:  2021 – 2023   |   Location: Cambodia and the Philippines

Healthy natural ecosystems are fundamental to climate resilient landscapes that provide multiple benefits such as food, water, clean air, income, and recreation to communities residing within them. Alongside other development activities in the landscape, it is essential to invest in strengthening this natural ‘ecological infrastructure’ by restoring forest cover and reintroducing biodiverse vegetation.

Nature based solutions provide simultaneous benefits to humans and biodiversity by addressing societal challenges by actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore ecosystems. Agroecology is the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of food systems while agroforestry is the interaction of agriculture and trees both for productive purposes and for protection, enhancement and/or integration with agriculturally-productive landscapes. Nature based solutions like green infrastructure provide alternative or complementary approaches to grey infrastructure for addressing environmental issues like flooding, water scarcity and soil erosion. Embedding these practices to promote restoration as core elements of landscape approaches such as watershed management provides an opportunity for integrated, multifunctional investments that demonstrate the value of healthy natural ecosystems to a wide range of stakeholders including local communities.

This ADB Knowledge and Support Technical Assistance project contributes to the identification, integrated planning, implementation, and future scaling of restoration measures from national, to watershed and to community scale. In doing so it will generate new lessons and knowledge products to support regional investment in forest and agroecological restoration measures for climate resilient landscapes. This is a regional project working with Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines to prepare three key outputs: 1) agroecological landscape restoration interventions promoted; 2) climate-resilient agricultural livelihoods in climate vulnerable communities promoted; and 3) knowledge on climate-resilient agroecological landscape restoration projects increased.

Activities in all three countries

These outputs will be actioned in all three countries through:

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Activities in Cambodia and the Philippines

In Cambodia and the Philippines, a multi-scale approach will be demonstrated with a comprehensive package of technical activities and capacity building workshops including:

Outputs

Methodologies, tools and good practice for restoration planning and implementation will then be documented and shared via four key products:

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Outputs and activities will support regional promotion of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and its goal of “preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of ecosystems worldwide” to supercharge global progress towards the 2030 deadline of the SDGs.