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Strategic Group: Resilient Economies and Landscapes
Delhi, India
30 October 2025 to 01 November 2025
Forest landscape restoration (FLR) has become a global priority, as it offers significant benefits such as ecosystem restoration, livelihood improvements, and enhanced ecosystem services. FLR is a long-term process of rejuvenating the ecology and improving well-being of communities across degraded forest landscapes and their surrounding areas. However, the success of FLR depends on the equitable and meaningful participation of stakeholders, particularly women, Indigenous peoples, and disadvantaged communities and individuals. This workshop on Integrating Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) in forest landscape restoration aims to build the capacity of participants to understand why GESI in FLR matters and understand how to embed GESI principles in FLR initiatives. The workshop aims to highlight the need for a GESI approach in FLR through a series of discussions, breakout sessions, and expert talks. Through the workshop, participants will learn about GESI principles, and gain knowledge and tools required for integrating a gender-responsive and social inclusion approach in FLR interventions, and its monitoring as well as the evaluation of the progress of GESI in FLR efforts.
The overall objective of the workshop is to build the capacity of the participants to apply GESI principles, approaches and tools to FLR initiatives for sustainable and equitable outcomes. It aims to:
Globally, the restoration of degraded forest landscapes has gained momentum over the last decade due to the increased recognition that restored landscapes play a crucial role in mitigating climate change at a macro level while generating positive outcomes for communities and the ecology at the local level. Despite its potential, FLR initiatives can underperform if they fail to address the systemic inequalities such as unequal access to participate in governance and decision-making processes, unequal access to information and resources, and unequal work burden and exposure to violence – especially for women and marginalised groups. GESI-responsive approach ensures that the voices of these groups, their knowledge of the landscape, and their vision for themselves and their local landscape are meaningfully incorporated into the FLR framework to create resilient ecosystems and equitable and inclusive communities. Additionally, GESI-responsive approach identifies gender gaps and biases and implements strategies to address them, ensuring activities not only avoid reinforcing inequalities but actively empower women and, other marginalised groups. Embedding GESI in FLR requires measures such as equal participation of women in decision-making at various levels and stages of the project, equitable sharing of benefits and costs, and inclusive governance and at the same time it can also address multiple Sustainable Development Goals such as SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), SDG 15 (life on land), and SDG 16 (peace, justice, and strong institutions).
Globally, gender inequality is one of the most widespread and pervasive forms of discrimination which impacts the overall human well-being and potentially undermines the goals and benefits of intervention programmes. Through a focus on an inclusive, equitable, participatory, gender-responsive, and socially inclusive approach, forest landscape restoration can proactively enhance community well-being by centring the voices of the most excluded and marginalised community members (by gender, age, income, disability, caste, and class). The failure to incorporate a GESI focused approach can lead to risks such as limited success in restoration outcomes, creating new or deepening existing vulnerabilities for community members, limited improvements in livelihoods of families and communities, limited improvement in access to resources and services for community stakeholders, and a lack of community buy-in. GESI enhances FLR by:
This training workshop will equip the participants with knowledge and tools to embed GESI in FLR efforts by building collaborations and designing restoration efforts that are more resilient, equitable, and widely supported by local communities, resulting in the success of the project.
The workshop will be held in-person over three days from 30 October-01 November in Delhi, India. It will feature a mix of presentations, expert talks, case study discussions, breakout sessions, and group discussions.
Representatives from the consortium partners of the Restore, Conserve and Protect Forest and Tree Cover for Nationally Determined Contributions Implementation in India (RECAP4NDC) project, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) India, Forest Survey of India (FSI), The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. These organisations are collaborating to implement the RECAP4NDC project, aiming to enhance forest landscape restoration efforts across four states in India – Maharashtra, Gujrat, Uttarakhand, and National Capital Region (NCR), Delhi.
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