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About Global Academy
An Academy of People and Organizations Leading Agri-food System Transformation
Global Academy is a partnership of organizations and people. Each of them fulfills evolving functions for particular initiatives and GA as a whole. GA’s orientation is to minimize the number of its ‘own’ team members and to optimize collaboration with local and international partners, many of whom have extensive teams that already operate successfully in diverse local and international contexts. These partnerships make it possible for GA to be a mutually reinforcing international ecosystem that strengthens Innovation, Capacity Building and Implementation towards a new mainstream of Agroecology and Productive Forests.
Why Agroecology?
GA use of the term Agroecology as defined by the Agroecology Coalition, of which GA is a member. It includes 10 Elements adopted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and 13 Principles defined by the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN). It embraces terms such as Natural Farming, Sustainable, Regenerative, Organic and Biodynamic Agriculture farming, and others. GA focuses on approaches that outperform chemical farming in all regards, see a list on the Home Page and a longer text below that describes the challenges of chemical agriculture, the benefits of innovative Agroecology and the ‘proof to scale’ gap that slows the growth of Agroecology and which GA contributes to eliminate.
Why Productive Forests?
GA use of the term Productive Forests builds on a growing international understanding that we have to find mutually beneficial ways to integrate conservation and sustainable livelihoods for the millions of people who will either cut down forests for cultivation and mining or are supported to generate better incomes protecting them. Our partners of the Forest and Farm Facility (FFF)—a partnership led by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), IUCN, and IIED—define productive forests as multifunctional landscapes that are sustainably managed by local indigenous peoples, smallholders, and forest communities. The Amazon region alone includes around 25 million inhabitants that have the potential to shift into sustainable livelihoods to preserve the forest - if we support them to do so.
Launched at COPs
Building on decades of prior work by its co-founders, GA was launched as their partnership in 2024 at the three UN Global Summits, the UN Biodiversity COP16 in Cali, Colombia; the UN Climate COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan and the UN Conference to Combat Desertification, COP16 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At COP 30 in Belem, GA launched together with Brasil’s Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Farming the Global Academy of Productive Forests that is part of GA.
TERRA
At COP 30, NOW’s co-founder NOW Partners Foundation (NOW) also co-launched TERRA, the COP 30 Action Agenda for the mainstreaming of Agroecology and Productive Forests.
Future Economy Forum
GA, NOW and the Future Economy Forum also hosted action-oriented dialogues at diverse UN events that led to many concrete outcomes. See sample programs here.
Private and Public Funding
GA is funded by private and public donors and by generating income for its activities that at the same time serve its purpose.