GLF Live Global Landscapes Forum

Genebanks hold the foundations of our food supply, offering insurance against the growing pressures of the climate crisis and other threats to crops worldwide. These seed repositories mitigate the risk of a food crisis in the future by ensuring a healthy, stable and diverse variety of crops will be available when we need it most.

However, many of the world’s more than 1,700 genebanks are vulnerable to natural disasters, war, social unrest, infrastructure issues, or a simple lack of funds. To ensure these vital resources are safe and secure, organizations are looking to form long-term funding and genebank collaborations, which have seen success with the Crop Trust’s Long-term Partnership Agreements (LPAs), which offer funding to keep seedbanks running in perpetuity.

In this episode, hosted in cooperation with the Crop Trust, host Natasha Elkington speaks with experts Sarada Krishnan and Michael Abberton about seeds, grains, genebanks and how long-term funding and collaboration can help protect crop diversity and the food supply of the future.

In the arena of corporate sustainability, there is a wide variety of language and jargon when discussing sustainability standards. How can a company reconcile these different languages as it embarks on its journey of financial reporting?

In this episode, produced in cooperation with the Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR) Impact Program, find out how a robust set of standards for sustainability disclosures could help highlight opportunities for investors and how various financial reporting standards can work together to achieve sustainable food systems.

This conversation features David Craig, co-chair of the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and Jingdong Hua, vice-chair of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), moderated by Nicoletta Centofanti, general manager of the Luxembourg Sustainable Finance Initiative (LSFI).

By 2050, a quarter of the world’s population will live in Africa. The continent and its people have an increasingly crucial role to play in deciding our planet’s fate – and our own.

For the first time in its 52-year history, an African woman is steering the ship of a CGIAR research center, CIFOR-ICRAF. Her mission is to “transform lives and landscapes with trees.”

In this exciting and exclusive interview, Éliane Ubalijoro, the new CEO of CIFOR-ICRAF and director general of ICRAF, shares her personal and professional journey across three continents that has led up to this important position of leadership.

Listen to learn about the deep connection with landscapes she forged while growing up in Rwanda, her journey studying and teaching global health in Canada and Europe, and her work to combat poverty and food insecurity across the Global South.

In this episode, find out how our new CEO envisions the future of our planet, and what needs to change – from replenishing our soils to the importance of public and private sector partnerships by also giving women, elders, youth and Indigenous Peoples a seat at the table.

Millions of people around the world still rely on wild meat as part of their basic diet, with an estimated 5 to 8 million people depending on bushmeat consumption in South America alone. However, unchecked hunting in environments already under pressure can contribute to the depletion of wildlife, threatening entire ecosystems as well as the people who rely on them.

The Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme is a major initiative of CIRAD, the World Conservation Society (WCS), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and CIFOR-ICRAF that aims to improve wildlife conservation and food security.

The program focuses on three key socio-ecosystems: forest, wetland and savannah, with CIFOR-ICRAF leading the work on “Consumption of wildmeat becomes sustainable” and the ”Monitoring and evaluation mechanism.” This collaborative project develops scalable approaches to conserve wild animals and protect ecosystems, whilst at the same time improving the livelihoods of the Indigenous Peoples and rural communities who depend on these resources.

In this episode, hear three experts – Nathalie van Vliet, Kim Spencer and Oswin David – discuss the CIFOR-ICRAF-led SWM project in Guyana, their successes in the past few years, lessons learned, plans for the next five years, and how this project could be replicated or scaled up.

If fashion were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the U.S., contributing about 10% of global emissions.

Each year, clothing production uses enough water to provide for 5 million people, while at the same time, up to 92 million tons of used clothes end up in landfills. This is the age of fast fashion – cheap, mass-produced clothes designed to reflect the latest trends, with new collections being released all the time to tempt us into buying more.

So, how can we dress up without chewing up the planet? In this episode, we expose the naked truth behind fast fashion and its impacts on communities in the Global South, as well as potential ways to forge a greener future for our clothes.

Can soil save us from our disastrous climate trajectory? While the search continues for natural and technological ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we seem to have forgotten just how much can be stored in the ground beneath our feet.

Soil holds an estimated 2,500 gigatons of carbon, which is more than all carbon in the atmosphere and in plants combined – and scientists believe it could sequester billions more tons annually through more sustainable agricultural and land use practices.

In this episode, originally released in June 2022, we quiz one of the world’s foremost soil scientists, 2020 World Food Prize recipient Rattan Lal, on why soil has been overlooked for so long – and how we can start to tap into all the benefits it can bring.