Empower and Thrive: Creating New Pathways for Development and Conservation

Hello everyone! My name is Hannah, and I am the new intern at IFCE. I’ve been here for a couple of weeks now, and I am enjoying every minute of it. I was especially excited to have the opportunity to attend a summit last Tuesday called "Empower and Thrive: Creating New Pathways for Development and Conservation," which was jointly hosted by the World Wildlife Foundation and Care.

What an amazing group of speakers! Twelve experts were divided into three panels, and each lecture had its own distinct approach to global development and environmental conservation.

The discussions from the first and third panels varied widely in topic, everything from the green economy to environmental policies in Mozambique. The second panel was more focused on a single issue: food security. Here are a few main points from the lectures:

    -Green Growth is the way of the future! If businesses integrate the idea of the value of natural capital into their models and work towards putting a price on carbon, they can save money and have more environmentally-friendly business practices!

    -Women are still at the bottom of the financial food chain, but they can play a large role in combating climate change. It is essential to promote education, job training, and reproductive health services for women, and to include women in decision-making processes at local government levels

    -Global food security is a major concern for the future. We will have to double the world food supply by 2050, but if we can maximize the yield of cropland and slow deforestation, we might be able to do it! We must also breed food that delivers better nutrition and uses less water and fewer chemicals

    The above are just a few examples of the topics we learned about, but I felt that there was an overall theme included (either explicitly or implicitly) in each of the lectures: partnership. Whether the speakers advocated partnership between state and local governments, between the public and private sector, between women and men, or between the World Wildlife Foundation and Care (two organizations with seemingly very different goals), the message was clear: climate change and environmental problems are everybody’s problems, and we must work together to solve them--even where we do not agree.