ESSA’s Darcy Pickard Participated in the Global Landscapes Forum New York 2019

Darcy Pickard at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in September 2019

In September 2019, ESSA’s Darcy Pickard participated in the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) event, Restore the Earth, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Marking the end of a historic Climate Week that saw cities around the world join in climate strikes and policymakers acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis, GLF’s event brought together more than 400 people from 46 countries who, like Darcy and the ESSA team, are passionate about ecological restoration and climate change adaptation.

ESSA brings its adaptive management mindset to these complex projects and has a long history of developing and facilitating collaborative restoration efforts, and designing decision support tools to inform ecosystem restoration planning. The event provided an opportunity to share experiences, challenges, and insights with the international community of restoration scientists.

The GLF facilitated many of the conversations that were integral to the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration – a decade set “to massively scale up the restoration of degraded and destroyed ecosystems as a proven measure to fight the climate crisis and enhance food security, water supply and biodiversity” (UN environment programme, 2019). GLF New York explored the potential and practical implications of ecosystem restoration. The dedicated decade presents an opportunity to accelerate existing global restoration goals and move towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement.