The 17th Session of the GM’s Facilitation Committee (FC), met in Buenos Aires on 12 March 2007, in the margins of the 5th session of the Committee for the Review of the Convention (CRIC.5).
The meeting was chaired by Mr Warren Evans, Director, Environment Department of the World Bank, and attended by UNDP, UNEP, GEF Secretariat, FAO and the UNCCD Secretariat.
The meeting was chaired by Mr Warren Evans, Director, Environment Department of the World Bank, and attended by UNDP, UNEP, GEF Secretariat, FAO and the UNCCD Secretariat.
FC members were informed that the GM is working on a six-year business plan, commencing in 2008, which will be presented at COP.8 in September. The GM also announced the adoption of a results-based work plan and budget for 2007, in collaboration with the UN Capital Development Fund.
Participants were updated on the outputs of the GM’s work planning, namely:
- strategic partnership-building at country level and regional level initiatives such as CACILM and TerrAfrica
- integration of UNCCD issues into development frameworks
- support to processes leading to an investment framework for SLM at country level, through government-driven National Financing Strategies
- capacity-building for constituencies to engage in national budgeting processes in the context of the new financial architecture
- GM Strategic Programmes, designed to back the GM’s country operations
- the overarching South-to-South Cooperation Programme (SolArid) and that between Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries.
The GM informed the FC that a strategic programme on forests and their rehabilitation had been launched and would be further developed in close cooperation with FAO and the World Bank. FC members concurred that forestry is a federating theme and believed that in view of the dwindling funding for rehabilitation of forestry resources and the emerging Global Forestry Alliance, the UNCCD could strongly influence the debate on mitigation and adaptation in the UNCCD context.
The meeting was also an opportunity to illustrate the new developments in the GM’s Financial Information Engine on Land Degradation (FIELD) and the analytical work being undertaken with regard to data collection/dissemination and to spearhead the development of targeted portfolio reviews of UNCCD-related projects and programmes, as mandated by the COP.
The next FC session is tentatively scheduled at the margins of the GEF Council meeting in Washington DC in May 2007.
The full report from the meeting will be published here soon.
