This session hopes to highlight the exchange of advanced ideas on set principles and recommended actions to promote and encourage management, restoration, rehabilitation, and sustainable utilization of degraded and secondary forests as a component of sustainable social and economic development.  It hopes to provide R&D information to guide watershed planners to integrate innovative restoration, conservation, and management of degraded watersheds at the local and landscape levels. This aligns with Priorities 1 and 4 of the Sendai Framework which emphasizes the investment in disaster risk reduction through structural and non-structural measures and the enhancement of disaster preparedness and to ‘build back better’.  

Topics include:

1. Indicators of success of rehabilitation and restoration

2. Impacts of forest landscape restoration

3. Innovative restoration of degraded areas

4. Traditional practices in rehabilitation and restoration

5. Adoptions and conflicts of rehabilitation methods 

The resilience of watersheds reflects the ability of the social and economic systems (SES) to absorb climatic disturbances and to reorganize themselves and maintain within the current domain or transform to another new stable domain in both ecological and social dimensions.  Management of watersheds to climate change requires a thorough understanding of the state and dynamics of the SES in response to climatic change.  Watershed components that increase resilience often correlate with practices that improve the ecosystem health of a watershed. Thus, this session covers Priorities 1 and 3 of the Sendai Framework as it highlights the multidimensional understanding of disaster risk management and investment in its prevention to attain resiliency. Additionally, it also addresses five of the Targets of the framework which aim in reducing mortality, affected people, economic loss, critical infrastructure damage, and basic services disruption, while increasing the availability and access of early warning systems, information, and assessments.

Topics include:

1. Building climate change resilience through integrated watershed management

2. Assessment and monitoring of impacts of climate change on watersheds

3. Climate resilient strategies and tools for sustainable watershed management

4. Integrated natural hazard control management in watersheds (i.e. flood, drought, fire)

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are a wide range of sustainable actions to protect, manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems. They are beneficial to both the ecological community and human society as they harness natural processes provided by an ecosystem to address both environmental and societal issues, such as climate change, disaster risk, food and water security, biodiversity loss, human health, and economic development. Hence, NbS are progressively recognized as effective and cost-efficient interventions to help establish resiliency. Nonetheless, evidence and assessment of its effectiveness are still insufficient, especially in the Global South. 

The session aims to share results from R&D endeavors assessing NbS strategies and effectiveness to help address the aforementioned gap. This is then in relation to the four (4) priorities of the Sendai Framework as this enables understanding, managing, reducing, and recovering from disasters.

Topics include:

1. NbS in watersheds

2. Evaluation of the effectiveness of NbS

3. Integrative/analytical tools and methodologies (e.g. eco-modeling)

4. Economic analysis of NbS adoption

Policies, legislations, and institutional arrangements in the management of watersheds are a challenge for the government. Watersheds are strategic areas necessary for economic, social, cultural, and environmental conservation interests. The sustainability of social-ecological systems depends in part upon the fit between institutions, the problems they are meant to address, and the contexts in which they operate. Institutional and policy research on integrated watershed management has been carried out in several countries. With the Sendai Framework, two (2) of the targets aim in increasing the number of countries with national and local strategies for risk reduction and another is for the enhancement of international cooperation with developing countries through adequate support to fulfill their actions for the implementation of the framework. Therefore, this is also in line with Priority 2 of the framework as it hopes to strengthen disaster risk governance. Most countries have initiated natural resources sector reform programs that stress comprehensive watershed management based on integrated water resources management (IWRM) principles, user involvement in government, cost recovery, and sustainable resource use.  Nonetheless, the overlapping roles between the central and local governments in watershed management have resulted in sectoral conflicts.

Topics include:

1. Legal regulations and governance on watershed management

2. Sectoral policies and institutional arrangements in watershed management 

3. Climate justice in watershed management