Transcript for GFP Poznan COP14

It’s important that we make the link between forests and climate change,

climate change and health, health and humans

We’re feeling climate change. We’re feeling global warming.

It has a real effect on our people.

Forestry, it’s calculated, can be about 30% of the solution to climate change

Forests produce air, sequester carbon, deliver water,

so everybody feels they have a right to say they are managed.

And we always say the forest is people’s property

Making communities participate,

it’s not only getting them together one afternoon and talk about a subject

It’s more about making the local population responsible

for the management of natural resources

If it worked for us, it’s because the population has understood that

by doing conservation valorization it brings them benefits,

especially socio-economic ones.

Women should be considered more,

they are right-holders of these areas

We have to combine the Western scientific thought

and the traditional knowledge

Indigenous people have been able to care take the land.

The biggest threat to forests is taking people away from their land

and drawing a circle around them and saying that they are now protected.

We are part of the solution for the climate crisis that is taking place right now.

Afforestation is necessary, but should not be seen as a way to offset

people’s emissions.

It’s important to think of forests to think of forests as carbon stocks

that must be preserved and conserved,

and also to think of forests as a sustainable source of bio-energy.

There still isn’t enough emphasis to maintain

the forests that we have as intact ecosystems,

not just for reservoirs for carbon sequestration

but as buffers for a number of different species.

I’d like to see the areas that have been deforested to be reforested,

and that to be funded by developed countries.

Because the industrialized countries need to pay the ecological debt.

Business can do one thing that a lot of other stakeholders can’t do,

which is mobilize resources, and to get goods and services

to us as consumers on time, and at the right price.

We don’t believe we can wait to policy-makers

and for administration to become ready.

If we want to have big successes in this sector,

we have to make mechanisms that make complex things

into, apparently, easy solutions.

It’s about a big organization with lots of noise that’s passing through, no.

It’s actions of proximity. It’s the mechanism that’s worked most.

We need partnerships, because on top you can’t do it all by yourself,

and at the bottom, you can’t do it all by yourself.

You need a coalition among all segments.

A global partnership is really important right now in the face of

turning centralized institutions towards local communities.

We have seen many programs developed at the global level.

And they come, they impose them on the communities,

they will do what you want them to do,

but when you are gone,

they will go back to do the things they were doing before.

But if you develop an initiative with them, they own it,

it’s likely to be more sustainable.

The process we’ve learned the most from

from is when we’ve engaged those individuals that are the most difficult to reach,

and perhaps we are least comfortable with

But they are the ones that add the greatest value to our work.

I just know that partnerships take a lot of time,

and it’s just like a relationship

it takes time to cultivate it, get to know your partner

and I can’t see any formula for getting that done.

I think that everybody does want to protect the forest.

It’s a matter to make sure that the connections are all there

That the partnerships are there to support what everybody wants.