The EbA South project showed conclusively that EbA interventions are feasible in three different environments, namely dry Mauritanian deserts, Himalayan Nepalese forests and coastal zones in the Seychelles. Hundreds of hectares of degraded ecosystems were restored across these three ecosystems. The project also showed that assembling knowledge on EbA (in the form of tools, handbooks and school curricula guidelines) and then sharing it via websites and mailing lists is an extremely effective way of raising global awareness on EbA and catalysing new EbA activities. One example of this is that Rotary International in South Africa is using the school curricula guidelines developed by EbA South to motivate the government that climate change and EbA should be integrated into school curricula.
Upper left photograph: a nursery of indigenous trees in Nepal. Upper right: a bay in the Seychelles that required planting of mangroves to stabilise the shoreline. Bottom: dune stabilisation in Mauritania with indigenous acacia trees and barriers to prevent sand movement.
Like any project, the EbA South project encountered challenges and identified new opportunities during implementation. The project’s steering committee noted that it is of critical importance to document all the challenges and opportunities to enable other EbA projects in the future to build on the platform created by EbA South. To this end, the lessons learnt from the project will be presented in three different formats: a peer-reviewed paper, a report for the terminal evaluators of the project, and five blog posts. The blog posts are the first step in a process of assembling all the lessons learned. The posts will be used over the next few months to generate discussion amongst stakeholders and refine the lessons for presentation in a peer-reviewed paper.
Please click on the links below to read the five blog posts.
- Regularly revisit the exit strategy for managing ecological infrastructure
- Sow the seeds of long-term research across multiple platforms and institutions
- Hire professional scientific interpreters and conduct targeted joint research to ensure long-term South-South collaboration on the science of EbA
- Quantify ecosystem goods and services in granular detail, and at a landscape scale, using state-of-the-art technology to heed international calls for urgent upscaling of EbA
- Develop EbA project budgets that take into account the complexity and time-consuming nature of constructing ecological infrastructure.
