 Hello everybody and welcome to this session where we are talking about work that in many instances goes unnoticed in many parts of the world. I am Godfrey Motizwa, I'm a journalist and I've been writing about the African story for the past 38 years or so and I have seen my fair share of the destruction of our natural environment. Nature of course like everything else is not static. It is subject to change. But scientists say that what is different about the change that we have seen over the past 4.6 billion years of human existence is that we are destroying the earth at a scale and pace that has meant that we are now threatened our very own existence. In all corners of the world we have got local communities that are working hard to protect their lands and traditions which have been threatened by climate and the nature crisis and exacerbated by rising security challenges. We all have our experiences of how this has gone about. So in this session today we're going to try to take you through the work that's being done on two corners of the world, one in Latin America and another in Africa. Please help me to welcome our panelists for this session. Let me introduce them. On my extreme left Emmanuel de Merode, he's director of Virunga National Park. Let me tell you a little bit about Emmanuel. Emmanuel is warden of the Virunga National Park which covers 3,000 square miles and 44 species including the endangered mountain gorilla who doesn't want to go and say it. We all do. From clean water to 300,000 people, it supplies electricity to 70% of Goma, a city in the eastern democratic of the Congo, a city that's been engulfed by fighting and tragedy over the past few years, a war that continues almost under the radar, it's almost like the whole world is forgotten and said it's normal that there's war in Goma but there are real people that live in Goma. His conservation efforts are being hampered as I was saying by the current civil law in the DRRC with 6.9 million people displaced, particularly affecting locations in and around the park that he's going to be talking about and the work that he has done. Thank you for joining us Emmanuel. Let me also introduce Uyonga Domingo Piers Nampichkai, he's president of the board of directors, Amazon's sacred headwaters. He is a 2023 Schwab social entrepreneur. This is a coalition of 30 indigenous nations in Ecuador and Peru. It protects 35 million hectares of tropical rainforest and they are trying to establish a protected region that is off limits to industrial scale resource extraction, rainforest by establishing a protected region. They are advocating a new economic model and we're going to hear about that model today that prioritizes the well-being of indigenous communities as well as the ecological integrity of the whole bio region. Please help me to welcome Domingo. Thank you. Let me also welcome to our session Atosia Sultani, director of the global strategy for the Amazon's sacred headquarters alliance. So they work together and the 2023 Schwab social entrepreneur as well. So the work they are doing is similar in many respects. She represents the Amazon's sacred headquarters in Glasgow for those of you who went to Glasgow and they were of course tackling big oil. Welcome ma'am. And last but not least Achim Steiner, executive director, UN environment and this was between 2016, sorry 2006 and 2017. Currently he is the UN development program administrator. He comes from Brazil and he has got knowledge of the challenges of conservation of nature on the front lines and opportunities to transform the religious economy through sustainable and environmentally friendly practices. He has been in the DRC. He was also telling me that he has been in Zimbabwe where I come from and there are many stories for us to share today. Thank you for joining us Achim. Let me begin by inviting Emmanuel to give us the work that he has done in the DRC and the targets that he has set in trying to preserve what some say is actually perhaps one of Africa's most important countries, particularly when you consider the minerals that are underneath in the DRC and then you continue of course the natural environment. Thank you. So first of all may I thank you. It's an enormous privilege for me to be here but I would like to say that it's really not my story that I wanted to share with you but the story of an extraordinary team of Congolese Rangers who for almost 100 years have been taking on what are really the great challenges of our generation, the challenges of environmental destruction, those of extreme poverty and those of violence and armed conflict. These young Rangers, generation after generation, have done so in the knowledge that so many of them would lose their lives in the process. So it all starts with this extraordinary park in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a park that is on the watershed of the continent's two great rivers, the Congo and the Nile and it is an explosion of landscapes, of extraordinarily diverse landscapes that go from the highest mountains on the African continent across its forests, its savannas, its wetlands and its great lakes and even offers a view into the very centre of the earth through its extraordinary volcanoes in the south of the park. And because of this incredible landscape diversity you equally have the greatest level of biological diversity on earth and the most famous of its residents of course being the mountain gorillas that we work so hard to protect and it would seem a shame, it would be a bit boring to reduce this to numbers but it is a national park that contains within it over 50% of all the terrestrial species of the African continent. It has more bird, reptile and mammal species than any park on earth, in fact there is a small stretch of less than 20 kilometres in the centre of the park that has more species within it than within the entirety of continental Europe and so from a conservationist perspective if there is one thing that we really need to protect, it is Virunga National Park, if we care about African conservation, if we care about the natural environment on the African continent and it has really been down to this small team of Congolese rangers of young men and women who have really dedicated their lives to that work which has been extraordinarily successful but about 30 years ago the tide began to change very abruptly with respect to their efforts and we saw this massive destruction of the park's wildlife and it really culminated in 2007 with the mass killing of the mountain gorillas, over 10% of Virunga's mountain gorillas were killed in the space of a few days and so it became incredibly important to rethink exactly what was happening, it was far too serious to be able to take up for granted the way we were doing conservation and really what challenged us the most was this image, it was a photo taken by a friend which after a year of investigation into why these killings were happening really helped us to reconsider the entire model of how conservation was happening in Virunga and of course it's a very disturbing image of a group of incredibly vulnerable women who are begging to access the park and what it did was to really bring to us the different realities of how people experience this national park, for us in the affluent world it's this extraordinary park with the greatest wildlife, the most inspiring wildlife, for people who live around the park and there are 11 million living in extreme poverty it's a source of energy, it's the only source of energy and energy is everything, it's the food that you eat, it's your health without the ability to boil your water, it's the region with the greatest number of cholera epidemics in Central Africa and so it's a question of survival, it's a question of the life and death of yourself and your children and so we're really confronted with a situation where we as a global community would like Virunga to survive and we benefit from the existence of that extraordinary biodiversity but there's also a cost and that cost is almost entirely being borne by the poorest and most vulnerable in society and so it's difficult to capture the extent to which we are looking at an issue of social injustice and where there's injustice invariably there's violence and you have to understand the dynamics of violence, how it relates not just to powerful people trying to have their way through the use of force, it's also a deep sense of social injustice within society and of course the cost was also to our staff, 211 of our staff have died since the beginning of the violence and so we have to counter that and it means thinking forcefully very creatively about solutions and so the part started working on alternative energy and developed an extraordinary program that captures the water that comes from these extraordinary ecosystems and converts them to electrical energy and of course what we have now is the greatest source of renewable energy that exists in eastern Congo from this national park, a program that is entirely built and managed by young technicians and engineers from the community and delivers 60 megawatts of energy to the community but more importantly is the birth of a whole new industry of agricultural transformation that's created 21,000 jobs. Now the key to that is that 11% of those jobs are young men and women who have been drawn out of the armed militias, these militias that have really at the source of this terrible conflict that's seen the death of 8 to 10 million innocent people in eastern Congo and is beginning to draw young men and women away from these vans into gainful employment and so that's really the dynamic and I'll leave you with this last picture, Shamavu, one of our orphaned gorillas that was taken by traffickers all those years ago and who this year will be reintroduced into the wild really is a symbol of a natural landscape that has become interdependent with the welfare of the community living around the park but of course it comes at the extraordinary sacrifice of these young Congolese men and women who really need to be remembered in that regard, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, incredible story, 10 billion people dead and we keep on going on as if there's no tragedy that's taking place. 50% did you say of the world's species in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, half of the world's species? I realize of course at the beginning that I exchanged you and Ahim but I'm sure you will forgive me. I'm very proud. Thank you. It's a great story to be associated with. Thank you very much for all your work. Let me invite Ayunka and Atosa to talk about the work that they are carrying out on the front lines in the Amazon. I think a region that we all know and we associate with all sorts of different things but I wanted to ask you to if you can connect and draw panels between the work that you are doing and perhaps the similarities that we see with the work that Emmanuel is carrying out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to greet you, all of you men and women present here. So for me, we are all sons and daughters of Mother Earth and we all breathe our fresh air coming from the Amazonian forest. The Amazonian forest is the heart of our planet. No matter where you are, whether you are in Congo, whether you are in South America, the Amazonian forest is unique. So in that sense, what my brother is doing is very similar to my work and our work in my indigenous community. For us, indigenous people, the Amazonian forest is a living being, a living being that has the same rights of any human being. In this area, we have visible and invisible living beings. So this is what I want to share with you. I would like to share with you the messages of our forest. So for us, actually we have been criticized by governments of many countries. They have told us that we are obstacles for development, we indigenous communities, but it is not like that. We have lived in the Amazonian forest. We respect the forest and we have a good communication and a good interrelations with the Amazonian forest. We have a spiritual connection with it. So in order to protect and preserve this ecosystem, we have organized ourselves. First of all, in order to be successful in our endeavors, we have created an indigenous alliance, an indigenous alliance with Peru and Ecuador, with 30 different communities. Our endeavor aimed to protect 30 million acres of rainforest. So the largest territory that has ever been protected is now protected thanks to us. So this is why today we are presenting this project in order to make sure that the Amazonian forest will no longer be for indigenous communities, but for the whole mankind. So this is why today we are presenting this project in order to make sure that the Amazonian forest is protected. So this is why we have incorporated every single river, because they come from the heights of Ecuador, the high mountains. They go across Peru until reaching the sea. The sea that we all share, we local communities, indigenous communities, that was our starting point for our works. We have had, nevertheless, a lot of difficulties. All the indigenous leaders have been threatened or even killed by companies and all of that for, or just because in personal interests. However, our endeavors are not for ourselves, but for next generations. We want to make sure that this bio region remains preserved, a region with a lot of indigenous knowledge with occult sciences. So we want to protect this natural wealth. We want for it to remain intact in order to preserve this fresh air that emanates from the forest and to make sure that this air reaches every single continent and every single human being. So from that point of view, after having come to an alliance among indigenous peoples, we've also come to alliances with non-indigenous peoples, because we're not listened to if we were working on our own. This is why we have to reach alliances, agreements with key people. To that end, we have a company called Datosa that we've been working with and we've been working together, and the idea is for this example to help us and to serve us. And the idea is that all together, indigenous peoples and not indigenous people are working together. We'll be able to reach a success, to be successful. We have to work hand in hand for a common purpose, a common goal. My colleague works with me and who's always with me. My great ally and friend, it's an honor to be with Domingo for 23 years. We've worked together. This area is, like Varunga, one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It's also one of the most threatened. Amazon Basin, as you know, is a vital organ of the biosphere. In this area of the Amazon, we are working with 30 indigenous nations to permanently protect this area from huge extractive threats. You'll see 92 oil concessions, 5,000 mining concessions, some of them active, some of them proposed. We made history recently through public referendum in Yasuni National Park, which is the sister equivalent to Varunga National Park, where people in Ecuador voted to keep the oil in the ground, the largest oil reserve in the Amazon, a referendum that won 60% of the vote. And now the government has to stop the drilling and remove the infrastructure and restore the area. We've been working in international form and also in the territories. Indigenous peoples are guardians of 80% of the world's biodiversity, yet less than 1% of financial resources for climate mitigation or adaptation reach the territories. Our alliance has created a way to build trust and capacity for indigenous peoples to implement this vision, the bioregional plan for the permanent protection of the headwaters, including everything from strengthening governance to promoting alternative energy, livelihood alternatives, territorial monitoring, legal actions for land rights to get legal title to the lands that still are claimed and not yet addressed by the governments of Peru. We are also working to promote bioeconomy, basically transforming the economic system from a life-blind economic system that we have today to one that is about life flourishing, that puts people and the ecological well-being of the ecosystem at the center. We established the Sacred Headwaters Fund. It is an organization that is made up of 27 organizations of which 24 are indigenous. They are basically working to implement the plan and they are ready to basically receive resources in the territories. We have great technical teams. We have been working also on systemic solutions, calling for a moratorium on oil and mining, calling for well-being indicators, calling for debt relief. The fact is our governments are mortgaging the rainforest to pay just the interest on the external debt. We need massive conditioned debt forgiveness to be able to get these countries out of this logic that they need to drill more just to pay the international financial institutions the interest on the debt they never get out of. So we invite you to join us. There's a lot more you can watch on sacredheadwaters.org. Our vision is in a beautiful video called Amazonia 2041. The Amazon's reached a tipping point. It is like Domingo says, up to all of us to make sure the heart and the lungs of our biosphere, which is the rainforest all around the world, in particular the Amazon and in particular the headwaters of the Amazon, the source of life, the most biodiverse place, the highest number of jaguars. Like you mentioned, it is unbelievable the amount of biodiversity that we're losing. Only 5% of the plant species in the Amazon have even been identified. Indigenous peoples have been living in harmony and like Domingo said, their territories are the most well protected. So we want to get the resources to the front lines and build alliances that are helping implement this transformational plan to go from an extractive to a regenerative flourishing bio-economy based on well-being. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please help me to thank our new set of warriors. When I was reading about this, I came across terms like forest defenders and when I looked at who they are, they are ordinary people, they are indigenous people, they are journalists, they are activists, they are people who in everyday work are doing a lot to serve our natural environment. And a couple of statistics that I picked up apparently since the world or the earth was created, according to scientists, 4.6 billion years ago we've destroyed 50% of the natural forest and of the ancient forest we only have about 20% that is left and we continue. So thank you for the work that you're carrying out. Let me turn to Akim for his thoughts on the connections between the two regions and the lessons that we can learn and perhaps a few thoughts on the economic model she speaks of, of how we can use the natural world we have while at the same time developing peoples. Thank you Godfrey and a great pleasure to join such a wonderful group of speakers or defenders of nature but also of challenges to a paradigm of economic development that has in so many ways turned us from being a part of nature into really an onslaught on nature. I mean if you look at the last 200 years of human development, partly out of ignorance, partly out of greed we looked at nature as really something to be harvested, to be used, to be exploited and often one for lack of understanding not appreciating how profoundly transformative the impacts of that kind of economic pathway would be to the future of the planet and humanity. And secondly then combining it also with something that you alluded to just now, also by the both of you spoke to that in the use of nature are reflected some extraordinary inequalities also in our societies in the way that we are able to access to extract much of the extractive industry of the last 100, 150 years has essentially been an appropriation of lands and resources from those communities who have lived with them for sometimes hundreds or thousands of years into an economy that was that accelerated view that the future is essentially one of making us independent from nature. So I want to begin by connecting a little bit this set of realities that we just heard about to this larger notion of living what now has come to be known as living in the age of the Anthropocene which translated means the age of humans because in many ways we are now in an era where humans have become so dominant as a species on the planet that we are literally transforming planetary systems and in many ways that has given us an extraordinary power to use to destroy but at the same time we live in an era where science, knowledge, understanding but also governance give us the opportunity to do something very different. This is not an inevitable path we are on and much of what you both or all three of you spoke about just now is this valiant battle to try and challenge a paradigm of how you develop. And I think as head of the United Nations Development Program I am always deeply conscious of the fact that we see extraordinary courage, innovation and leadership emerging precisely from the kinds of realities that you have described. I visited Emmanuel in the DRC and in this extraordinary Virunga National Park or that region of the DRC and you at the time Emmanuel also recounted to me in let's say also more personal ways the deep re-learning that you went through with your team in understanding that Virunga National Park would ultimately only survive as this wonderful place where nature and humans could in a sense preserve something extraordinary if people were part of this and not excluded from it. One of the tragedies we have been dealing with is that nature conservation has often been reduced to nature protection and this is where we often go wrong. That park produces power today without compromising its ecological integrity. That park has become also a magnet for a business school. I don't know if that is still running but the kinds of skills and industries and jobs that you described you showed me this crazy idea of building a business school in the Eastern DRC in order to develop the business skills, the manufacturing skills that would allow people to use the assets that the park would provide in a perpetuity in order to also make a livelihood. Just like you are battling the debate in the Amazon right now over a fossil fuel and extractive industry that for a relatively short time horizon could compromise the entire ecological integrity and here comes also this issue of ignorance. Maybe 100 or 200 years ago we did not know that the Amazon is literally the largest water pump in the world and the whole of South America is hydrologically dependent on a functioning Amazon ecosystem in order to generate the rainfall, the water flows that are there and yet just a few years ago again in the country not far from you there was a government that declared essentially open season on the Amazon and here I pivot to my second point which is the importance of linking this kind of insight and alternative thinking to also the way in which we deal with policy. At the end of the day we all live in nation states, there are sovereign states, policies are made, laws are passed, rights are enshrined or ignored. How do we deal with that? And just between the previous administration and the current administration in Brazil in less than a year we have seen literally a 50% reduction in deforestation in Brazil. Now if you ever wanted to have an illustration of what the difference is between one set of policy paradigms and another here you have it. Now throughout this period indigenous peoples, environmental defenders and many others had tried to stop in a sense the previous government from taking those steps but it took an election, it took a policy debate in Brazil to generate a very different paradigm. I think this is where for much of the work that I do every day with my team of colleagues in UNDP our partners with many organizations like yours is to try and find a way in which we can enlighten policy making to the point where it recognizes that in the 21st century humans are not going to separate themselves from nature then go to the moon. Now that may be your most direct way of saying I no longer depend on nature but as far as everything else that happens on planet earth in our economies, in our societies, in our industries whether it's food security, whether it is climate change, whether it is access to water, fertile soils all of this demands of us a fundamentally more intelligent relationship with nature which is central to our economy rather than just an extractive resource. So a lot of the work that we try and do is to help countries develop the kinds of policy frameworks that set the right incentives that connect climate change action to biodiversity and conservation action but also both of them to livelihoods and economies of communities and entire nations to remove the distortions in our economic systems where literally last year again according to the IMF the world spent 7 trillion US dollars of taxpayers money to artificially reduce the cost of using fossil fuels and then we have communities, indigenous peoples in Virunga the story of oil is inextricably also linked to what has been playing out we expect people like that to be able to stand up to a 7 trillion dollar subsidized economy this is where we need to get serious about policy, about rethinking the way we move forward putting in place legislation that empowers communities and here Godfrey, we spoke briefly, you come from a country called Zimbabwe which over 25 years ago took a fundamental legislative decision which was to devolve the power over wildlife back to communities because 100 years of colonialism and conservation policy had essentially disappropriated wildlife from the communities who live with that wildlife the famous campfire program began a process where legislation and economic empowerment literally countered the view that wildlife would only be protected and preserved in national parks and yes sometimes difficult for conservationists that wildlife could also be used sustainably in order for people to generate an income and a livelihood without that kind of policy you would not have had people benefit from wildlife it would have been as often as the case simply been appropriated by a few who might control the upper end of a tourism economy or otherwise so let me end by just saying what connects not only DRC and Ecuador and Peru or the Amazon and the forests of the Congo basin is not just the ecological significance it's actually the emblematic nature of where we find ourselves at this moment in time where living in the Anthropocene is both the most destructive moment in the history of humans on this planet but by virtue of the choices, the science, the technologies the intelligence that we can bring to this challenge of sustainable development we could actually literally transform the next 100 years of development into precisely the opposite of what it has been to the benefit of everyone and ultimately to future generations and I think this is why so much of what we are discussing here is also permeating into a world economic forum debate for many years now because the balance is still not there look at where we are at the beginning of 2024 thank you thank you I had the opportunity of actually visiting the campfire program that you speak about I wrote about it and the impact that it has on some of the poorest people in Zimbabwe said to say I don't know and I don't think that program survives today and I think it comes to the next point that I wanted to raise you speak about the importance of policy but I think perhaps there's an opportunity here perhaps to widen that discussion it should perhaps begin with education this year the statistics show how many people, four billion people also are going to be voting in national elections policy change comes from the governments that we elect as you have just eloquently demonstrated in Latin America so perhaps we need ought to be doing more here in terms of education so can I come to you atosa and ask for your thoughts in terms of perhaps collaborating with other efforts that we are seeing here and perhaps also engaging in the education that enlightens people on the work that you are doing so they don't just see it in terms of you shutting them out of the natural environments but in terms of national development well one of the amazing things that we have been able to launch in the last year is exactly that when you think about indigenous nations in the Amazon we're not just talking about communities yes we're talking about communities but we're also talking about intact indigenous nations who are governors who are governing millions of acres of their rainforest territories and Domingo had been saying to me look we're getting older we've got to be evolving and engaging and training the next generation of youth and currently the education system in these countries is actually creating loss of identity loss of culture and the amount of education indigenous peoples receive the access to education is very little and the education they receive is not relevant for creating governors of massive rainforest territories so we launched a school that was Uyunkar's vision he had had a vision in ceremony that's called the Living Amazon School we inaugurated it in March and it's training the next generation of indigenous leaders who will be inheriting these territories from everything from the cosmology of indigenous peoples to things like practical skills on satellite monitoring, deforestation all bioeconomy, project implementation and so I do think education in the territories is key the right kind of culturally appropriate grounded in the reality the others that we need ecological understanding by the time we graduate from high school around the world we need to understand how earth systems work when I talk about, like you said, the atmospheric rivers the fact that 70% of the content of South America's GDP depends on the atmospheric rivers from the Amazon but also in California Amazonian atmospheric rivers bring us rain in the spring for our agricultural productivity people are like, wow, we don't know that and the fact that this information is not taught in schools we've got to teach earth systems the biosphere is our home and there is a science to how the earth functions and that is something we should learn by the ecological principles how nature does it how does nature design the economy and this is missing in our education so that's a key point so, thanks very much Domingo, you want to add to that? yes, of course so at this point of the discussion I always object whenever young people are not involved especially in international events I never see a lot of youth representation either boys and girls there is a lack of youth participation but we need to realize that the that the leaders of the future are the youth or is the youth so the idea is to create this sort of school in order to make sure that the youth is educated and prepared to face the modern world but we also want to include the young people young men and women who participate who live already in the modern world we need to include that in our ecological efforts so we need to learn from one another let me give you an example so there was the son of this entrepreneur a young man a son of an entrepreneur will budget the price of a tree so that's the notion of a modern young man nowadays but for a young man coming from an indigenous community this tree will represent many other things will represent knowledge, health, tradition so that's what's important for us the importance of life and this reality is not very well known so we need to combine both sciences whenever we talk about preserving nature we do not engage in a discussion in order to paralyze the old industry that would be impossible nowadays because that will bring the world to stop but what we want to see is a real transition so when Casagradas for three years has been working in order to hire professionals from different profiles economies, technicians, etc in order to make sure that we manage to design a new strategy for development in the future and here it is this strategy can be implied in all corners of the Amazonian forest that's very important governance is very important indigenous nations need to learn how to self-govern their territories so we need to learn as we go forward we need to start going towards reforestation and natural economy we need to realize that our nature gives an added value for the whole world so that's where we need to invest not only in mining industry not only in the oil industry or deforestation we need to invest in reforestation and other programs concerning tourism like the one I've been working with for 23 years within the framework of this program we have preserved the environment but we have also invested in education so that's all I could tell you for now if I had money I was going to abide the time for us to continue from the IMF unfortunately we are running out of time I had a quick check around the room to see who we have here and to his point we need more young people we are talking to ourselves but we are not talking to the younger generation that's coming up if you are watching us online please the hashtag to use is Wef24 let me come unfortunately to the end of our session by asking Emmanuel very quickly we have a lot of news reflections on some of the force that we had here and perhaps ways in which you can take the Virunga out of Virunga into Africa and perhaps into the world very quickly if you get a couple of minutes I mean in terms of learning I was thrown out of my economics class at university because I kept falling asleep and I only lasted two weeks but what I did remember what I do remember is the notion that finite resources go up in price over time unlimited resources go down in price and what we are talking about is using those resources the environment sustainably which makes them it renders them infinite and so when the line that represents the cost of fossil fuels increases over time and it crosses that of renewable resources we've won we've created economic viability and so it's a question of time and not everyone unfortunately has understood that I think what brings us together and I'm so pleased you mention Yasuni because that really was the beacon for Virunga because a forested landscape can win over big oil because it's the right decision it is actually possible and it is a pragmatic realistic way of moving forward if we can hold that line for long enough eventually it will become cryingly obvious that it is the best thing for society and it is viable economically and I think that's what really brings us together is putting the interests of the community first whilst appreciating their economic needs thank you please help me to thank our panelists unfortunately we have run out of time we have run out of time I think we needed more thank you for sharing your stories thank you for all your efforts we ought to be thinking beyond where we are and develop that model that you speak about that you are talking about and that we need to work together we're not talking about killing the old economy we're talking about transition integration and we're talking about investing in the future we need young people to know about the issues we're talking about today so they become the new warriors the new defenders of the future and we ought to be learning from each other thank you all very much