The components
The partnership consists of a series of commitments and action-oriented coalitions focused on deliverables, with a view to translating political commitment into action.
Its main components are:
Elaborating National Action Plans
Building on the GM’s catalytic support for the elaboration of National Action Plans (NAPs) for the Caribbean SIDS, this component will enhance the technical and financial support to country Parties, to enable them to progress effectively in mainstreaming their NAPs into national and regional development agendas and in forging linkages between their NAPs and the SLM programme priorities of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Establishing a Sub-regional Platform for UNCCD implementation
This platform will include all relevant stakeholders involved in local rural development including national and local administrations, UN agencies, bilateral and multilateral organizations, the private sector and civil society, with a view to identifying needs, priorities and niches of opportunity for investment within the framework of sub-regional integration efforts and agreements.
The Platform will build on complementarities with other multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) such as the UNFCCC and the CBD and will provide technical support to the Caribbean SIDS to honour their commitments under the UNCCD and implement practical investments on the ground.
Developing an integrated Sub-regional Action Plan (SRAP)
The elements identified during the NAP processes as having relevant regional and/or sub-regional implications, will form the basis of a SRAP for SLM in the Caribbean SIDS.
The SRAP will, in turn, support strategic planning and the design and implementation of initiatives oriented towards rural poverty alleviation, sustainable use of natural resources and rehabilitation of land degraded areas in the sub-region.
Designing methods and tools for monitoring and measuring land degradation
Mobilizing technical and financial resources for the design, development and implementation of initiatives and projects to assess and monitor land degradation in the Caribbean SIDS, is the focus of this component.
A fundamental part of this component will the Sub- Regional Land Degradation Assessment (LADA) being undertaken by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the initiatives related to the development of desertification benchmarks and indicators, aiming at coupling these initiatives with the NAP and SRAP processes.
Capacity development and policy analysis
In line with the GM’s Communications Strategy, this component seeks to strengthen partnerships with national and sub-regional research entities so as to enhance data collection, dissemination and downscaling of global models and to promote the systematic identification of pilot programmes, success stories and best practices in SLM in the Caribbean SIDS.
The information collected will be processed and packaged in such way that the knowledge generated will provide practical guidance to country Parties and may be easily fed into NAP and SRAP processes through south-to-south collaboration mechanisms.
It is anticipated that the Universities in the Caribbean SIDS will play a leading role in this context.
South-to-south cooperation
The programme will build upon the experiences of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti and will be designed to more effectively transfer the knowledge acquired and the experience gained in these countries, to other Caribbean SIDS.
A workshop in Barbados (June 2005) sponsored by UNEP and GM has further contributed to the definition of the operational modalities of the PISLM task force and to the development of a work programme for the PISLM, which has been strengthened by the support through south-tos-outh collaboration in specific thematic areas offered by of other countries in the LAC region such as Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina.
Targeted GEF interventions
Targeted GEF interventions are envisaged to complement the various sub-components. The starting point will be a number of initiatives already under development focusing, inter alia, on the rehabilitation of degraded lands in island ecosystems, benchmarks and indicators, and traditional knowledge.