Monitoring Desk
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has welcomed the recent decision by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Council to approve 13 FAO-led projects in 16 countries, totaling some $78.5 million dollars.
The decision came during the 59th GEF Council Meeting and will build upon its June 2020 decision to approve $176 million for FAO-led projects.
The projects address global environmental crises that impact the productivity and sustainability of agricultural systems on land and water across five continents. They will be implemented in partnership with and co-financed by the governments of the countries involved: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Fiji, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, Tajikistan, Vanuatu, and Venezuela.
The approved projects provide pathways for countries to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic while building the long-term resilience against future shocks caused by increasing climate risk and environmental degradation. The projects will assist countries and communities to adopt more sustainable and climate-resilient practices, enact stronger policies to conserve biodiversity and natural resources on land and water, and foster policy coherence and transboundary cooperation.
The approved projects will directly benefit 480,000 people, restore over 340,000 hectares of degraded land, improve the management of nearly 7.4 million hectares of landscapes and 5.2 million hectares of terrestrial and marine protected areas, and mitigate 12.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
This builds on the results of the FAO-GEF partnership to date, which has benefitted nearly 5 million people, created 350,000 jobs in rural communities, safeguarded biodiversity in close to 200 vulnerable marine ecosystems, and saved some 1,000 crop varieties, animal species and breeds from extinction.
