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Written by Oscar Crespo
This was my first in person contact with a United Nations event. Everything went as expected: most speakers repeated the same few concepts, kind words, reiterative information. The Forum offers countries an opportunity to share their views, experiences, and contributions to the work of the forum (‘voluntary national contributions). A few countries provided some interesting updates from their recent forest policy achievements or their main concerns and demands like the following ones:
- Importance of monitoring emphasized through some projects like the one mentioned by Peru.
- Israel called for increasing cooperation within the Mediterranean region for facing the risks posed by climate change.
- Most of the developing countries pointed out the need of cooperation, capacity building and technological transfer to achieve the goals set by UNFF
- Romania pointed out some of their most recent efforts to fight illegal logging and dealing with their forest land restitutions policy.
- Chile announced the creation of its own Public Forest Service (Servicio Nacional Forestal), until now CONAF, a private non-profit organization was responsible for managing the forests in Chile. Forest policy in Chile, a major forest products exporter, is going through a review process after the catastrophic fires of this past season that burned down more than 270,000 ha.
- Argentina and Panama mentioned their incentive programs for reforestation
- Switzerland called for a single reporting mechanism.
- Nepal pointed out the importance of community forests in the country and their role in rural development.
- In general most countries pointed out the need of cooperation and every single intervention showed support for the goals of UNFF.
Do you know the Global Forest Goals for 2030 agreed by the UNFF this past January? In a nutshell, they are the following ones:
- Reverse the loss of forest cover and achieve a 3% forest area gain by 2030.
- Enhance the economic, social and environmental benefits of forests and improve the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities.
- Increase the area of protected and sustainably managed forests worldwide
- Mobilize financial and scientific resources for the implementation of sustainable forest management.
- Promote forest governance.
- Enhance cooperation, coordination and coherence across organizations, sectors and stakeholders.
For further information check the following link.
Can we achieve this goals by 2030? What do you think?
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