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.