Events

Join us for two seminars this spring on ecosystem restoration and landscape management and how they relate to food systems and water security.

Talk #1: Laying the Groundwork for Global Restoration: Capacity Needs and Technical Barriers across the Restoration Continuum

Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026
Time:  4:00 - 5:00 p.m. ET
Location: MIT Campus -- Room will be emailed to registrants. This is an in-person event.
Speaker: J-WAFS Visiting Scholar Khalil Walji, from the Center for International Forestry Research/World Agroforestry Center (CIFOR-ICRAF)

Walji will explore the practical constraints countries face in implementing large-scale ecosystem restoration, with particular attention to the role of productive landscapes in sustaining food systems and water security. Drawing on work under the Global Biodiversity Framework’s Target 2 and Integrated Landscape Management initiatives, the seminar will examine how restoration is not a binary shift from “degraded” to “restored,” but a continuum of recovery, where agricultural lands, rangelands, forests, and agroforestry systems can progressively rebuild ecosystem services.

Talk #2: Reframing water and food governance: from ecosystem impacts to systemic human change

Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026
Time:  4:00 - 5:00 p.m. ET
Location: MIT Campus -- Room will be emailed to registrants. This is an in-person event.
Speakers: Kim Geheb and J-WAFS Visiting Scholar Khalil Walji, both from the Center for International Forestry Research/World Agroforestry Center (CIFOR-ICRAF)

This talk will draw on lessons from the EU-supported Landscapes for Our Future program, focusing on how systemic shifts in power and social behavior can yield durable governance outcomes.

About the speakers:

Khalil Walji is a global practitioner-scholar working at the intersection of ecosystem restoration, integrated landscape management, and sustainable food systems across the Global South. From 2021–2026, he is serving as Deputy Coordinator of the EU-funded Landscapes For Our Future (LFF) programme at CIFOR-ICRAF, advancing integrated landscape approaches through multi-stakeholder engagement, adaptive governance, and learning-oriented practice. Trained as a soil scientist with an interdisciplinary background, his work focuses on translating systems-level theory into practice in complex landscapes where food security, biodiversity, and livelihoods intersect.

Kim Geheb is a political ecologist and practitioner-scholar with the Center for International Forestry Research/World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya. He specializes in integrated natural resources management, water governance, and the political economy of natural resource institutions. He has worked extensively on food-water systems in Africa and Southeast Asia, and brings to both contexts a sustained focus on how power structures shape—and limit—governance outcomes. His current research applies complexity science and practice theory to the design of interventions that address systemic drivers of landscape degradation rather than their symptoms. His work draws on political ecology, commons theory, and assemblage thinking to reframe conventional approaches to ecosystem governance as fundamentally questions of institutional power and collective action. He obtained his doctorate from the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.