The seven experts selected by the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) and the Youth in Landscapes Initiative (YIL) are working in different streams of nature conservation from mountains, forests, drylands, and wetlands, to oceans in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They are now part of Restor, home to the largest collection of community-led projects, organizations, companies, and governments working to protect and restore nature.
With Restor, the restoration stewards are now part of a global network of doers, learning from one another on what works and what doesn’t, sharing stories, and building a movement of hope and action. Making conservation and restoration projects around the world visible to global actors supports the redirection of financial flows towards projects on the ground, and in doing so creates a viable pathway for an increase in funding to locally-led nature-based solutions whilst also promoting equitable development.
The Restoration Stewards program is a one-year holistic program rooted in care, landscape leadership, diversity, intersectionality, and intergenerational equity. Launched in 2020 by the Global Landscapes Forum and the Youth in Landscapes Initiative, it aims to support every year the efforts of youth-led teams in holistically restoring their landscapes and seascapes while nurturing biocultural diversity. So far, the program has supported 26 youth-led projects in 16 countries across Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific.
Meet the GLF Restoration Stewards 2024:
Dyana Blanco 🇧🇴 Dayana Blanco is an Aymara woman and the co-founder of the Uru Uru Team, a network of Indigenous youth in Bolivia. The team is dedicated to safeguarding the ancient Uru Uru Lake. This project blends community mobilization, activism, traditional knowledge, and with nature-based solutions in praxis: placed on floating rafts made of recycled plastic bottles, the native aquatic Totoras plants help absorb heavy minerals from the polluted waters. This contamination, due to mining, plastic pollution, and climate change, is affecting the lake’s unique flora and fauna and the surrounding seven Indigenous communities.
Explore Lago Uru Uru on RestorAnna Obi 🇳🇬
Anna Obi is a conservationist and a member of the Biodiversity Rescue Club (BRC), which focuses on involving students and young people in restoration activities in Calabar, Nigeria. The club’s Mangrove Restoration Project is being conducted in the Esierebom community, located in the Calabar South Local Government Area of Cross River State. The project aims to revive and reconstruct the natural structure and functioning of mangrove forests in the community of Esierebom in Calabar South Local Government Area, Cross River State, Nigeria. The project will enhance biodiversity, local livelihoods, carbon capture, and water quality.
Explore Mangrove Restoration Project on RestorSteve Misati 🇰🇪
A Kenyan Marine Conservationist, Steve founded Youth Pawa, a nature restoration and ocean conservation organization based in Mombasa, Kenya that promotes community awareness of nature restoration. Misati's work is driven by a deep love for the ocean and a belief that everyone has a role to play in protecting it. The organization's flagship project, the Mangrove Eco-Restoration Project, aims to restore over 50 hectares of degraded mangrove forests in Kenya by the year 2030. This drives the Youth Pawa team to adopt the community-based Ecological Mangrove Restoration (CBEMR) approach, which aims to facilitate local communities to restore and steward their mangroves while deriving sustainable mangrove-based livelihoods.
Explore Youth Pawa on RestorKamanzi Claudine 🇷🇼
Claudine, a Rwandan agriculture enthusiast with a background in conservation agriculture, is one of the founders of the Forest for Life initiative, which aims to revive dryland in the Kayovu Model village in Rwanda's Bugesera district. Along with three other youths, Claudine has been working to increase biodiversity, improve soil fertility, and promote sustainable land management practices, all while having a positive environmental and social impact. Their project helps create a resilient and productive landscape through capacity building, reforestation, and agroforestry systems using native indigenous trees in collaboration with the local community.
Explore Forest for Life Initiative on RestorMaria Geane Bastos 🇧🇷
An agroecologist by training, Geane is a member of the Xique-Xique agro-ecological farming community in the Quilombo (Maroon Community) Lagoas, within the Queimada da Onça community, in the municipality of São Lourenço do Piauí, Northeastern Brazil, where they work towards recovering degraded lands, through agrosilvopastoral and agroforestry systems. Geane and her brother have spent the last five years restoring land, building capacity, and raising public awareness through sustainable land management and agroforestry systems. These practices not only reintegrate people into their environment but also enable them to produce food, generate income, and restore degraded environments in the Caatinga ecosystem.
Explore Fazenda Xique-Xique on RestorJann Vinze 🇵🇭
A Filipino nature conservationist and storyteller, Javie is committed to mainstreaming community-led biodiversity conservation through local involvement in Antique, his home province in the Philippines. He is the founder and chairperson of Dulungan Youth, a youth-led grassroots. As part of the team’s restoration efforts, they are developing a program that fosters landscape leadership rooted in community-based conservation strategies. Their work covers the conservation of the rufous-headed hornbill –a bird recognized by IUCN as critically endangered– as well as behavioral change through alternative livelihoods, ecological education, assisted natural regeneration, and agroforestry.
Explore Dulungan Youth on RestorTrisa Bhattacharjee 🇮🇳
A conservationist and an ecologist from India, Trisa, supports, monitors, and evaluates the work of communities and women self-help groups in the western Himalayas to restore landscapes with native plants. This project aims to restore the landscape of Chamba in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. The team works with local communities and women’s self-help groups to mitigate the climate crisis, reduce human-wildlife negative interaction, and provide ecology-based livelihoods to local communities.
Explore Himalayan Restoration Project on Restor
Restor collection of all GLF Restoration Stewards: Explore here
Written by Restor Communications
Published in
Community stories
on
May 24, 2024
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