The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization formed the Task Force on Best Practices during this, its UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030). As expressed on their website:
“Unsustainable land use and destruction of natural ecosystems have contributed to global land degradation, climate change and biodiversity loss. To prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2021–2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.”
This dedicated website of the Task Force on Best Practices includes information on its objectives, outputs, main achievements, and ongoing efforts.
As a follower of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization for the past two years, EWF’s Founding Director Rose High Bear reviewed UN FAO’s publications on the state of the world’s biodiversity, and discovered that the most biodiverse regions of the world are cared for by our world’s Indigenous Peoples. None of these regions are located in the North American continent. High Bear has now been selected to participate in this Task Force. She has agreed to support and contribute updates on the ongoing efforts to increase biodiversity on our Indigenous Biodiversity Farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
EWF’s Indigenous Biodiversity Farm is being developed to serve as a model for transforming agricultural land into a more biodiverse ecosystem by integrating Native plant species with organic agricultural crops and including dry farming practices also developed by Indigenous peoples. EWF will play a small role in this Task Force by documenting and disseminating the good practices at Indigenous Biodiversity Farm. Our pending partnership is being planned with Elanor O’Brien at Persephone Farm in Sweet Home, Oregon and other partners who continue to support our efforts. We will update our supporters in future issues of this newsletter.
The United Nations just released their publication, Capacity, Knowledge and Learning Action Plan for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is freely available online. This action plan provides a global capacity needs assessment; a stocktaking of knowledge products and capacity-development initiatives; and extensive targeted consultations with global and regional stakeholder groups.