Taking part in the Caux Dialogue on Land and Security (CDLS) 2014 encouraged  German climatologist Hartmut Behrend to move out of the bubble of well-intentioned international activism to work on the ground in Mali. 

Hartmut Behrend first came to the Caux Forum to speak about the relationship between adapting to climate change and resolving conflict. Until then he had been working on the macro level, as part of an international community of scientists and activists.  Now, he is leading two major projects in Mali for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). These aim to integrate adapting to climate change into regional and local planning, as part of Mali’s commitment to the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change.  

Mali is a hotspot for the impact of climate change on security. The country’s greatest security concern is the conflict between herders and sedentary farmers, which is intricately bound up with the pressures on resources created by climate change and land degradation. 

Hartmut began by mapping the vulnerability of Mali’s land mass to discover which communities were most at risk from climate change, taking population density and lifestyle into account. It emerged that those who lived on the margins between sedentary farming and herding were most vulnerable. This reinforced what Hartmut had discussed at Caux:  that the vulnerability caused by climate change carries an immediate security threat.

The mapping allowed Hartmut and his team to present a strategy to the government and to donors, so as to direct the funding available for tackling climate change to the areas where risk is greatest. 

In rural Mali, Hartmut is working to promote agroforestry and sustainable agriculture, proven responses to climate change which he and Patrick Worms of the World Agroforestry Centre had discussed at Caux. He is educating the international community about the impact of these measures in Mali, suggesting solutions that have been devized in tandem with communities, such as building stone walls along contours to prevent rainwater runoff and soil erosion. He has also devized plans for bringing small-scale electricity generators to villages to prevent the cutting of trees for firewood. 

Hartmut says that CDLS was central to informing and shaping his approach to his work in Mali. In fact, he is now so busy there, implementing his learnings from Caux, that he says he has little time to return. In the short term his aims are to direct climate funding to rural areas of Mali and increase the country’s implementation of the Paris Agreement. These aims are fundamentally informed by the CDLS, which emphasizes the importance of decentralization and the need to address local conflicts so as to initiate regional solutions and, in time, a sustained approach to national ones. 

Alan Laubsch is passionate about restoring nature’s ‘climate superheros’ – the mangrove forests. He believes that democratizing natural capital investment is key to this. He has over 20 years’ experience in risk management in leading financial institutions. More recently, he established Natural Capital Markets at Lykke AG and is a founder and chief strategist of the GenBlue venture studio. 

Alan Laubsch took part in the 2017 Caux Dialogue on Land and Security (CDLS), where he met Arne Fjortoft and Bremley Lyngdoh from Worldview International Foundation (WIF), who were implementing the first mangrove restoration project in the delta region of Myanmar. Later that year Alan and his team met with contacts from the CDLS in Myanmar, and together they established the Global Mangrove Trust to help Arne Fjortoft scale up his pilot mangrove restoration project there. 

They used TREE (Heyerdahl Climate Pioneers), a digital token that Alan helped to design and which is the world’s first mangrove and Blue Carbon-backed blockchain token. TREE has raised $1.5 million so far and has incentivized the planting of 1 million mangrove trees at Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park, which is managed by WIF. 

Alan vowed to return to Caux every year. The structured dialogue of the CDLS helped him to understand the links between land and ecosystem restoration, conflict resolution, community building and sustainable finance and restoration economy. It opened up opportunities for developing partnerships with others working in this domain. He collaborated with Natural Capital Alliance, an initiative launched by CDLS participants, which peer-reviews blockchain projects with the aim of building a trusted global marketplace.

Back at the CDLS in 2018 and in 2019, Alan was happy to see that the topic of blockchain was more prominent than the previous year, and that more technologists and entrepreneurs were getting involved. Inspired by the energy in Caux, he has committed himself to target mangrove restoration at scale and replicate the project that WIF has implemented in  Myanmar. 

Alan sees Caux as ‘a true serendipity engine’, which brings opposite worlds together and build a global network of trust.