Alan Channer was working on a peace project in Baringo County, in the drylands of northern Kenya, when he received an invitation to a conference on ‘Restoring Earth’s Degraded Land’ in Caux, Switzerland in July 2011. The conference was the inspiration of Luc Gnacadja, then Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). 

Northern Kenya was in the grip of a vicious cycle of environmental degradation, climate change, food insecurity, conflict and displacement, so the conference seemed relevant to Alan and his team at the United States Institute of Peace and in Initiatives of Change.

Alan and his colleagues returned to Kenya eager to test the idea that land restoration could help reduce conflict over dwindling resources.  IofC partnered with  two local community-building organizations to run a workshop on trust-building for sustainable development in Marigat, Baringo County, a hotspot of conflict between pastoralist communities.  It was facilitated by Kenyan IofC activists Joseph Karanja and Joseph Wainana and Alan.

The community leaders who attended the workshop generated an action plan to end cattle-rustling in the county. Alan made a short film, Restoring Land, Restoring Lives, which featured on the UNCDD video gallery. Shortly afterwards, the team of community leaders in Baringo were selected by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to serve as independent observers of the national elections in March 2013.

‘Without peace, we cannot have development in this county,’ the Deputy Governor of Baringo County, Mathew Tuitoek, said at a meeting with the IofC team. He went on to lead a delegation of five county officials to the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security in 2013, funded by the County Government.  From that point, the ripples of the Caux Dialogues on Land and Security began to spread across Kenya.  Meanwhile, Alan joined the Steering Group of the Initiatives for Land, Lives and Peace programme (ILLP).

The next year, Deputy Governor Gabriel Lagat, from neighbouring Elgeyo Marakwet County, brought a second team to Caux.  During his keynote address, he offered to host a Caux-style Dialogue on Land and Security in Kenya – and invited ILLP to co-organize it with him.

This invitation was a watershed for Alan.  During the time of early morning reflection at the Caux conference, he shared that he had been wondering whether he should spend a prolonged spell in Kenya with his family.  It seemed that Dr Lagat's vision was one that he should respond to, and that 'land, lives and peace' was a calling he should pursue, despite the financial uncertainty. 

Joseph Karanja, Janet Jeruto, Stephen Kimaru, Simon Thuo, Meera Shah, Paul Keitany and Alan organized two Dialogues on Land and Security in Kenya – in 2015, in Baringo County, and in 2106, in Elgeyo Marakwet County. The events were supported by the governments of the two counties, the National Drought Management Authority, the National Land Commission, Coffey Kenya and several other institutions.  They had strong participation from the World Agroforestry Centre and World Vision and other agencies in Kenya. Highlights of the second Dialogue were broadcast on national television primetime news.

Alan’s own engagement with the synergies between land restoration and peace building deepened. He wrote a chapter on 'Trust-building and mobile pastoralism in Africa' in a book inspired by the Caux Dialogues, Land Restoration: Reclaiming Landscapes for a Sustainable Future, (Elsevier, 2016). He became a Programme Associate of the EverGreen Agriculture Partnership at the World Agroforestry Centre and produced two short videos with them, to encourage small holders to use nitrogen-fixing trees alongside their maize crops.  He began researching the potential of farmer-managed natural regeneration as a window for conflict transformation in conflict-prone drylands.

He made a film with UNDP in Chad to highlight the importance of building trust between pastoralists and farmers. He worked with Nigerian mediators, Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye, to conceive a project on transforming pastoralist-farmer conflict in Nigeria which won the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations /BMW Intercultural Innovation Award in 2017.  The aim was  to foster a win-win-win for the parties to a conflict and the environment.

Alan is pioneering in 2019 a 'Caux Land and Security Summer Academy' for mid-career professionals in the fields of peace and security and environmental restoration, in a partnership between ILLP and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

He looks back on all that has unfolded in the seven years since he received an email on the shores of Lake Baringo inviting him to ‘Restoring Earth’s Degraded Land’. He says, ‘Today's extraordinary global challenges require innovative, holistic responses.  CDLS brings together an incredibly diverse array of important actors in a spirit of trust and co-operation; it makes the generation of innovative, holistic responses possible. It gives me fresh hope for the future of people and planet.’

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Initiatives for Land, Lives and Peace aims to deepen understanding of links between land degradation and human security and to build the trust needed for effective collaboration on the ground and in ‘land-peace partnerships’. As a programme of Initiatives of Change International, it inspires, equips and connects people to address world needs, starting with themselves.

Among other activities, each year ILLP organizes the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security in the Swiss village of Caux, in collaboration with Initiatives of Change Switzerland, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The CDLS is much more than an annual Dialogue. It is located at the centre of a growing network of practitioners working on every aspect of human security and ecosystem restoration. They support each other, inform each other, and collaborate with each other.

‘We are not doing enough to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption …this is the challenge on which our generation’s leaders will be judged’. With these words, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres opened the UN Climate Summit in Katowice, Poland in December 2018. Attending the summit as observers and technical experts was the Initiatives for Land, Lives, Peace (ILLP) delegation, Irina Fedorenko, Patrick Worms, Rishabh Khanna and Alan Channer.

The winter air of Katowice has the faintly sweet odour of damp smog. 80% of private homes in the European Union that use coal for heating are Polish. There was consternation that a global climate summit could be hosted by a nation whose energy policies ignore global warming. Nevertheless, the welcome given by the Polish government to the 30,000 conference delegates was unequivocal and the event very well organised.

‘Think of that evening back in 2015 [in Paris],’ said the President of the Summit, Polish Secretary of StateMichal Kurtyka. ‘We agreed in Paris we will do it, but we did not agree on how to do it. Katowice is about agreeing a set of guidelines to unlock global, just and transparent action. The spirit of Paris is here. Let us live up to it.’

Tensions erupted at the Summit when the United States, Russia, Saudia Arabia and Kuwait said they would only ‘take note’, rather than ‘welcome’, the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report drawing on the conclusions of 6000 scientific studies.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres intervened again, urging everyone that “To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.” Europe and scores of developing countries responded positively, pledging to toughen their existing commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to prevent average global temperatures from rising a further 1.5C.

It became very clear that effective dialogue and relationship-building is needed at all levels. The trust gap between Global North and Global South remains wide. More positively, countries that may not be talking to each other about some things, such as India and Pakistan, are talking to each other about climate.

The ILLP team presented on the theme of ‘Trust – the essential ingredient for bountiful landscapes and climate resilience’ to a full house at the pavilion of the African Development Bank.

In her introduction, Louise Brown from Namibia, Coordinator of the Africa Climate Change Fund, spoke of her personal experience at the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security and the mixture of participants – scientists, policy makers, farmers, grassroots activists, faith leaders, economists, peacebuilders – whom she had encountered there, and which made it ‘unique’.

We spoke of community-based approaches in Africa to manage trees in forests and agricultural landscapes so that they can absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; the role of new technologies, like drones planting mangroves in Myanmar, and the role of new financial mechanisms to achieve the necessary investment in land restoration.

There was a flurry of questions, including one, from a Mexican, on how you build trust between outsiders and indigenous peoples. We emphasised the importance of the outsider ‘embodying trust’ in his/her relations with indigenous communities.

Louise Brown concluded the ‘inspiring’ event with warm thanks to the ILLP team and the Caux Dialogues on Land and Security (CDLS).

Later, Carl Pendragon, Executive Director of Skymining, and a participant at last year’s CDLS, spoke at an event hosted by the Global Environment Facility, in which ILLP was also a contributor. ‘Climate change is not the problem,’ he said. ‘It is the symptom of a deeper problem – a spiritual crisis.’ Pendragon went on to explain that solutions must be found not only in the realms of technical innovation, but crucially also in human attitudes and behaviour.

Irina Fedorenko, Managing Director of the Caux Dialogue on Land, also shared her impressions:

COP24 in Poland was different to the ambitious COPs of Paris, Marrakesh and Bonn. The mood swung from blind optimism to despair. You may have read in the news about countries disagreeing over whether they “welcome” or “acknowledge” the report about the possible scenarios of 1.5-3 degrees of global warming. This has sparked anger from countless civil society organisations, young people and activists. And so it should. We now know, that we are on course for 1°C warming, as evidenced by increased floods, cyclones, snow storms and forest fires. The science is clear, and yet, much to our frustration, whilst the politicians fight about which word is best, the world suffers the consequences of catastrophic extreme weather events.

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From our point of view, as conveners of the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security, the single common denominator of reaching climate goals and implementing bold solutions is trust. Trust between people leads to better governance, land management and ultimately the success of the intervention. Trust allows pastoralists to agree on a rotation for grazing that is sustainable, for communities to preserve their forests, for farmers to incorporate agroforestry practices and for governments to implement multi-stakeholder international projects, such as the Great Green Wall.

ILLP is the organizer of the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security, along with Initiatives of Change Switzerland, The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The Caux Dialogue on Land and Security 2019 will take place on 27-30 June 2019.  

The Caux Dialogue on Land and Security’s managing director, Irina Fedorenko, was invited to speak at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) 2019 in Davos, Switzerland. She shares her personal experience below.

The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland has just closed its doors for another year but this time I was part of it. Rather than focusing on the justified criticisms of excessive opulence and the ever-increasing number of private jets taken by the attendees, I would like to highlight the transformative dialogues and connections that shaped my Davos experience.

On 23 January 2019 a group of Oxford University students and alumni took to the floor in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Tent. We were speaking on behalf of the Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Trust Scholarship and Leadership programme, the largest philanthropic scholarship supported by the University of Oxford.  During the panel entitled “Young Voices of Hope: Perspectives from the Latest Wave of Emerging Leaders” we shared the most challenging issues faced by our countries of origin and how our time at Oxford and within the Leadership Programme has inspired and equipped us to be the driving force behind tangible solutions.

While the WEF attracted global industry leaders to discuss the most pressing problems faced by society, we used this opportunity to remind them how urgent and vital it is to invest in young people who can work together towards a more tolerant, more understanding and more sustainable world. In the words of Trust Chairman, André Hoffmann, “Knowledgeable and skilled leaders are needed to shape more equitable and sustainable societies, particularly in trouble-stricken regions.” You can read more about the programme here.

The next day, 24 January 2019, I spoke at The Solver Series. This event was hosted by Mark Turell, the founder of unDavos, the platform which provides access and cross-pollination of ideas and connects those who want to change the world so that they can work together to achieve this. The discussion focused on water and technology and how innovation could be a force for good in ecosystem restoration and replenishment of water tables globally. Some exciting technologies were highlighted, such as Weathertec’s solar powered installations which turn atmospheric humidity into rain and BioCarbon Engineering’s use of drones to seed large areas of land. However, everyone agreed that the key to large-scale environmental restoration is wise governance and land management, topics that usually dominate the agenda of the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security.

Another highlight of that day was the SDGs 2030 party, which celebrated the planet as if it had achieved all of the Sustainable Development Goals and how the world would be looking by then. I used my chance to get up on stage and paint a picture of the future, where all the forests have been protected and all 350 million hectares that are currently in need of restoration have been reforested, which has stabilised the climate.

The last day of WEF, the stage was dominated by a rare and unique blend of people who are passionately committed to providing sustainable and purpose-driven services to build regenerative and inclusive economies and create green jobs. The Future of Humanity Forum took place, where a panel of CDLS participants spoke about economic solutions for sustainability. The panel consisted of myself, Ashish Domah (Founder of The SDGs Company), Dr Bremley Lygdoh (Founder of WorldView Impact), and Aland Laubsch, (CEO of Earth Pulse). We discussed land restoration and technology, and the role of blockchain technology in creating a sustainable economy and green jobs.  The event was recorded and will be turned into a film in order to educate a wider audience about the SDGs.

While the panel recognised the importance of small and individual actions in achieving sustainability targets, they emphasised that large-scale actions are usually driven by visionary CEOs and politicians. These themes echo the conversations and synergies that often arise in Caux.

Recognising this, we invited all participants to join us for the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security  and Ethical Leadership in Business conferences, taking place on 27-30 June 2019.

Through my work and my own personal journey, I have come to realize that there are a great many things I cannot control, but the little I can control, that I can change, is in me. There are two tools in particular that allowed me to start with myself and to navigate my way through this complex world. These two tools are …. Silence …. And Love. 

Here are some tips and images that might help make these tools more accessible. The first image is something that has somehow slipped its way into our lives (and our pockets) that we simply can’t live without anymore.  The Smartphone! And, what does every smartphone need no matter what generation it is? Connection and Energy.

We humans are bit like smartphones, because we also need the same two things... I would say Silence can provide some great connection, it’s like a secret password to some really amazing wi-fi, and energy is, a lot like love. In my experience I have found nothing that provides greater impact no matter what the domain.

Let’s start with Silence. Plenty of research has shown that in this terribly busy and loud world we live in, a little silence goes a long way.  They claim it can help us retain information better, reduce stress, increase happiness… basically good for everything. And yet…think about it, when was the last time you sat or walked in silence, without earphones, without looking at your phone and just listened to your own thoughts and feelings?  Was it recently?  Do you feel like you do it regularly?  Do you feel you have enough silence or quiet in your life?

Staying with the Smartphone image I would propose that you can look at your need for silence on three levels: one for downloading, one for communicating, and one for upgrading the system. For all of those things a good Wi-fi is useful.  First, for Downloading, a question to ask oneself is: do I have a daily (or regular) space for silence?  A walk, a moment of reflection, a moment to center myself? Am I listening to myself? This can allow me to process everything that I have heard or lived (or want to live) and even be a bit of a reset button to get you back into the present.

For the second, Communication, a good question is: am I “connecting” well to others, am I listening to them? For there to be listening someone needs to be silent.  A beautiful image that was once given to me is that when others speak, am I giving them the space to say all that they have to say? Can I be a blank page in front of them allowing them to write out everything they have inside?  There are certainly times where I have listened to someone with the type of pseudo-silence where I was either thinking of something else or just planning my response and found that my “connection” was not the best quality and therefore my responses were definitely off mark.

And lastly, for Upgrading, a question is: do I have periodic spaces of deeper silence or slowing down?  A long hike in nature, a retreat etc…Sometimes we need an extended moment of silence to be able to hear, see and say what it is we have inside. Sometimes we need a longer silence to upgrade our perspective and go beyond our own blockages and recognize our blindspots. A lot can be resolved, or improved with silence.

Now, for the second tool. Love.  In a world craving for likes and inundated with  heart emojis, I believe many would admit we have a slight deficit of Love. But what is love? It is a lot of things, and includes everything from what holds families together, to what friendship is made of, all our concepts of romance, and the simple interactions of common decency and respect between human beings. In other contexts the word compassion or perhaps in French “bienveillance” can also be suitable. I am talking about something concrete, more than an emotion. It takes effort, but at the same time can be as simple as a smile. Love is an another key ingredient in improving the world and yourself, because that is precisely what it does, it takes you beyond yourself and connects you to others and to life as a whole. It is an energy that you both give and can be charged by.

Perhaps a model that helps illustrate the love I am talking about is what I would call a “Love Triangle.”  Now this is not some sort of Hollywood or Netflix scenario, calm yourselves… Love, for me, has these three sides to it.  Myself, the other, and the whole (or Beyond).  It is a triangle and there is a flow, or energy, between them.  I cannot love others without in a sense also feeling connected to a greater whole (or drawn beyond), and I can’t love anyone without realizing that I have something of value to offer them.  In other words, I can’t love anyone without also loving myself and feeling connected to the greater whole and vice versa.  Now this Whole, or Beyond is naturally hard to define, I admit.  You can also put other words here like humanity, universe, or for those of a religious background you can put the word “God”, it all fits. 

If there isn’t a sense of flow between the three sides, then I would suggest something is missing. If you are constantly loving others but don’t take time for yourself (don’t charge your batteries, going back to our image) then be prepared for problems.  If you love and focus only on yourself then it is hard to serve and be connected to a greater whole and so forth. These can also be separate moments where you take time to be with yourself, or where you are concretely loving others, or in some way shape or form connecting with some greater whole. But ultimately, all love ideally has elements of all three sides of the triangle.

So what?  Seem basic?  Of course it is, but they are so basic that we also get a little side-tracked at times. Here are some guiding questions, perhaps to be asked in a moment of Silence, that help me center back on love: how does my love-triangle look? What would be love in this situation? Where can I put love in my work? What is the “why” of doing what I do?  Love is a great why, and Silence is great place to ask that why, to check it, to make sure you are still on course.

Now no need to pressure yourselves to stay three hours in silence and to be “love experts” tomorrow. Like every journey, you advance step by step. Just try to put a little more silence and little more love today. How about we give it a try, a short one, just 30 seconds of silence… without touching your smart phones… and simply enjoy the quiet and ask yourself where is the love in my life, and where can I put some more?

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How was that? Not too bad? Try a little longer next time.

I wish you good luck and much joy in finding good connection and in using (and charging) your energy.

Watch Rainer's entire TEDx Talk at Geneva University here.

Photo top: from TEDx YouTube video

Photos silence/love: Rainer Gude