 and welcome to this issue briefing on scaling restoration focused value chains. My name is Nicole Schwab, I'm the head of Nature Based Solutions and 1T.org at the World Economic Forum and I will be your moderator for this session. Forest landscapes and the conservation and restoration of forests is essential, I would say existential, if we are to address the climate and biodiversity crisis and the private sector has an essential role to play in driving restoration and scaling restoration approaches. There are many reasons why private companies would want to invest in forests and with 1T.org, the Trillion Trees platform of the World Economic Forum, we are driving a movement and a community of companies that are engaging in this area. Today we have 6.8 billion trees that have been pledged by different companies and we are working together with them to ensure socially and ecologically responsible implementation. Today we want to look at one specific aspect of this business case for restoration and that is non-timber forest products. So what do we mean by that? There are more and more products from trees that have a huge potential particularly in the superfoods and in the cosmetics markets. Some of these are already quite well-known, asai berries for example or shia butter, but others are just emerging, baobab and many other commodities that are still not well known but have a huge potential not only in terms of their environmental and climate benefits but also for the socioeconomic impact on the local populations. So we want to look at this today and together with me we have a stellar panel that is working on different angles of these restoration-based value chains. So let me introduce our panelists. First we have Irine Arias, Chief Executive Officer at the Inter-American Development Bank IDB Lab. Hello Irine, thank you for joining us. We have Gabi Lodolf from Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics. Hello Gabi. And we have two of our top uplink trillion trees innovators. We have Wayne Collin, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Los Alleados in Ecuador. And hopefully joining us soon we may have William Quenday, founder of Sirius Shia in Burkina Faso. We're still trying to connect him and we hope he will be able to join us in the course of the session. So the topics we want to cover today with our panel are really around what are some of the exciting new innovations and what are some of the partnership opportunities that can drive restoration through these non-timber forest product value chains. And so to start with I want to turn to you Gabi. Lush is one of those off-taker companies that is sourcing some of these natural ingredients, some of which are also quite new on the market. And you are really an example of what is possible and how we can start to drive new market opportunities at an international level for some of these commodities. So my first question to you is can you share some of your experiences at Lush in building demand for some of these ingredients and also your approach in how you source these products? Absolutely. Thank you so much. So at Lush we are very fortunate. We're a privately owned company and we invent, manufacture and retail our own products. So that gives us quite a degree of flexibility and a lot of room for innovation as well. So the way that we approach this is really twofold. We spent the last decade or so working on our vision of leaving the world lusher than we found it. So how can we have a regenerative impact environmentally and socially through everything that we buy? So there's a move from sustainability towards regeneration and what does that look like in terms of environmental impact or social impact and also on almost a regional basis. So we have had this amazing journey and amazing opportunity as well to work with different communities, different entrepreneurs around the world. And I think for us the people at the heart of any of these projects are key. So conservation and restoration are top of our gender when it comes to sourcing. How can we source things in a way that enhances and protects biodiversity? But to do that you really do need to put people at the heart of it. So for us it's been about finding partners that have a very strong commitment and vision within their local communities and also understanding that we don't have the answers as a company, but we're able to help support and facilitate in some of these things. So we are looking more and more to increase the number of non-timber forest ingredients that we're using and also looking at how we can support the impact by, I guess, diversifying the systems in which these are produced. So how do you design systems that are multi-layered that incorporate food security as well because that's a crucial element and also create resilience for the growers behind them so that if there was to be a market fluctuation or climate event, we could still ensure that the communities have their cash crops and their food. So it's a very much a case by case location by location approach that we're taking. So that help is a starting point. Thank you Gabby. I think very interesting the comprehensive approach that you mentioned, I mean multi-layered and regenerative. And I want to ask you maybe to zoom in a little bit more specifically on some of these ingredients. We've wanted or we've just released a report looking at the untapped potential of great green wall value chains. As we know there are some very interesting ingredients. I mentioned some before like Baobab and Shea but also some other newer tree crop ingredients that are not yet known where maybe there's some R&D that is still required but that have an immense potential in the cosmetics and the superfood markets. And so I wanted to ask you maybe just to share a little bit more about whether you are already sourcing some of these great green wall value chains that can at the same time support the vision of the great green wall to restore 100 million hectares across Sub-Saharan Africa and maybe also I mean Moringa is another one of them. And also what are some of the challenges that you as a company need to overcome in order to successfully partner with some of the local producers, SMEs and developers? Absolutely. So yes we do use Shea butter and Moringa and Moringa has actually been fundamental in our journey and understanding restoration and regeneration. So we started working with Amazing Group in Ghana that we're using it to restore very degraded landscape because it had the food benefit and then also the the seeds pressed for oil. So we are using the Moringa oil we have used some powder in the past but it's a great tree because it has so many multiple functions that it can serve in terms of income generational food and Shea as well is a long-standing ingredient for us and we have a couple of different supplies that we work with. And one of the challenges with something like Shea is in order to ensure not just the now or the next 10 years the restoration or the replanting that has to happen but also how do you create that value for something that won't yield an income for quite a long time? And that's where the building multi-layered systems comes into play again. So for us I'd say one of the challenges in working directly with communities or in some of the SMEs is how do we create a partnership that is beneficial and allows them to reach other customers as well because we do have a limited demand even as an international company there's only so much that we can use. So really making sure that we're setting people up to be able to access a wider market and not creating a long-term reliance because we want everyone to be able to thrive even if rush weren't around. So thinking about how we do that it's also understanding what our role is. It can be just an off-taker sometimes it could be providing seed funding for some of the investment or some of the projects themselves or it can be capacity building and understanding of appropriate technology it could be helping people understand how to access or supply to international customers. So it's really taking that view that it's not just about the financial side but there's a whole host of other sharing of knowledge and information as well. Thank you very much Kaby. I think that last point is really critical in terms of the role the private sector can play and that as you say there's many different it's not just the investment but it's also the like kind of the technology transfer and the capacity building the access to other potential off-takers as well. So I think that's a great example and a good segue since we've been talking about Xia to William I think William has joined us. Yes, hello. Hello William. Hello Nicole. So thank you for joining us. With serious share you have been also at the forefront in terms of developing a holistic approach to share and working with local communities. We've just heard from Lush kind of an example of what the private sector sees as opportunities in terms of supporting these value chains on the ground. So it would be really interesting to hear from your perspective if you could share a little bit more about what you've been doing, what your approach has been to sustainability and this link between restoration and kind of the socio-economic development and impact on the ground. Thank you Nicole. We started working with Xia more than 10 years ago. I left the U.N. around 2010 and the objective that I had was to bring agricultural technology. So we of course started with some agricultural project and because one of our stakeholders based in Asia was using the share for chocolate. We started to organize the communities to be able to supply the volumes of share that they needed. Most people don't know that 90 percent of share actually goes into chocolate and confectionary around the world and I keep saying that this is one of the reason why it's a key ingredient in the food supply chain because without it you might not have chocolate and that's not funny. Now we were exporting up to 20,000 tons of share which gave me an idea of the magnitude. Now it's estimated that about 15 million women participate in this value chain and process about 1 million tons of share and out of this 1 million tons 90 percent I'll say 80 to 90 percent goes to the confectionery industry. Now the problem that we found very early beside the usual issues of how the value chain is structured from the ground which mean from the collectors all the way to the export just to speak of what happened in country was that in order to produce one ton of share nuts because at the time we're mostly exporting the nuts we had to use or the women had to use 10 tons of wood okay so and we found some time as people can see on the great video that you've done that World Economic Forum has done that they were massively starting to use the share trees themselves and you can see the impact because once the share tree started to be used is used for a lot of other things because they take them down and this is when with the support of the World Bank and the African Development Bank we develop this processing platform that we call the Clean Activity Center so you know zero carbon and deforestation free which can produce a higher even a higher quality of share butter that is available so the problem in the value chain so start at the bottom and we had in yesterday was a great session about carbon about carbon monitoring in the value chain that we had with TLM and and one of the one of the the important point today is that technology can help us to to monitors the value chain and see what is the real impact right yes thank you will I maybe one last brief question because as you as you rightly illustrated it's all connected right and I mean the energy the water the production so we don't want to introduce perverse incentives as we're trying to scale these value chains to scale restoration what would be your request or recommendation when talking to potential new off takers who are interested in kind of sourcing share or investors or what's kind of the one key thing that that is a challenge and that really needs to be addressed by the private sector looking to engage in partner in this value chain okay we we recommend that they look at the sourcing in in a holistic way you know the that they can be measured the real impact and and they take in account the cost the the environmental cost and the human cost of of this value chain so our value chains that we call the the plus value chain is we say it's it's beyond fair trade it's beyond fair trade because you you account the true value of every activities and every impact that goes into this value chain and and we are yet to fully develop the tool for that but we have developed a tool that can help and this is why I think yet having a complement with satellites imagery which is not available can can give us a even more accuracy in in this in this new label if you want that that that we call beyond fair trade thank you William beyond fair trade I think very important everything that you said and and it's a good segue to now move to the Amazon we have another amazing entrepreneur Wayne you've been working with hundreds of families in Ecuador in the Amazon also helping them to bring their products to the market and looking kind of at the Amazon bio economy so can you share a little bit more about your work and and also kind of your take on these value chains and what are some of the challenges that you've encountered in trying to to link restoration with the the socioeconomic impact and kind of bringing this to scale yeah sure hi Nicole and yeah so at Aliados we're a non-profit organization we were founded also about a decade ago and but we have quite an entrepreneurial approach our foundational experience was partnering with a private company Runa LLC to combine for-profit and non-profit resources to set up a new value chain with a very interesting crop Amazonian crop called yusa tea it's a crop which grows and is drunk in the very early mornings by indigenous communities in every family has one or two trees in the backyard but we saw that the crop also has very high caffeine levels polyphenols antioxidants and yeah we just you know thought okay how can we get this amazing product to market and yeah so with Runa we built a value chain from soup to nuts the vertically integrated value chain connecting with over 2,000 smallholder farmers to to fair trade organic markets and it's a market that now exists over over 100 tons of yusa is sold per year there are a host of of new companies which exist from farmer organizations to to partner off-takers buying and selling yusa fast forward a little bit that that that led us to think about okay really Aliados us as an NGO what's our model here what's our value at so we took a closer look at at the problem and the opportunity and the problem is clear deforestation is a problem in the Amazon agriculture is a main driver of of deforestation in the Amazon and tropical ecosystems but there is an opportunity and the opportunity is that the world needs more food and that food needs to be grown sustainably and we see the smallholder farmers really are the key to to helping to solve this problem smallholder farmers produce food in a much more sustainable way they produce huge volumes of food but there isn't a great connection between these smallholder farmers and global markets so that's where we come in so Aliados we're an ecosystem builder we work we have an integrated model that works at the farm level supporting farmers implement regenerative agriculture we've been working with regenerative agriculture for the last three years and it is incredible not only does it increase production it increases crop resilience it increases ecosystem services so we work hard to to support farmers with seed capital and training to implement regenerative agriculture but then you need to get those products to market so we incubate local businesses that have the capacity to aggregate add value package and commercialize these products so it's building local business capacity and helping with seed capital and then this another service we provide is helping to connect with off-takers sometimes it can be difficult we're talking about different cultures indigenous cultures big global corporate off-takers i'm sure gabby knows all about it there's work to be done there in building those connections and we're very excited now to be you know we're about to launch a new partnership with the idb lab and it's not just about selling products there's value that's being created here in terms of carbon sequestration in terms of how do you building traceability connecting smallholder farmers to clients to the end consumer so it's and this is eminy so there's there's a there's a system here or a service that needs to be provided to to gather and manage this knowledge at the local level and see if we can fold those values into into the the products that are being created thank you Wayne that's a yeah i mean you're providing exactly that those key services right to to connect that the as you say the smallholders with the international markets and and just a quick last question scale how do we get scale how we do we get more organizations like yours what do you see as the key lever maybe the key challenge and kind of the key lever to be able to get to scale great question i think focusing on successes i i think that's what's needed right now models that work um so that's what we're focusing on now we're working in in four different ecosystems but going deep i think you've got to go deep first that it's easy to think about going broad and and and spreading out um but i think you've got to go deep first make sure that you're building local leadership is key you can't can't avoid thinking about you know in 10 or 15 years time who's going to be leading here it won't be me it's got to be local leadership um i think another piece is good knowledge management i think tech has an important role to play how do you manage the the generation and and creation of of knowledge that connects stakeholders in a in a more efficient way um and then i think once you have success and once you have a systematic model that's what we're paying a lot of attention now too it's like with NGOs it's very easy to become people dependent really hardworking employees do a great job but we're focusing on processes and systems um so focus on processes and systems that that can be replicated partnership and really partnership is is key so so focus on partnership principles bring people together negotiate deal with conflict um and and yeah i think no way to go thank you wane thank you for your great work and this is a great segue to idb and idb lab at urna and idb group and idb lab are playing a key role here and and of course supporting entrepreneurs um like wane uh with the work that they're doing so a question to you is when you look at this whole ecosystem you know how do we kind of enable the whole ecosystem and and what is also the role of innovation to unlock some of some of these levers to scale some of these partnerships how is idb lab thinking about this thank you nicole i'm so great to be here and and and learn frankly of the different models and and see wane and all the great work that's been done and um so i'm i need any idb lab it's the innovation and adventure arm of the idb group so we are in focus on using tools like innovation and the more and more available technologies that can be applied to solve problems make things better using new models and and of course i'm very happy to be with in this partnership now several years in a row with with the web and and one trillion trees dot org um and and with colleagues within the idb group that are really passionate about this um this topic and um particularly i want to thank idlis and faun who's actually right now in the heart of the amazon uh developing new opportunities in talinga and the triple border of peru colombia and brazil so um so i think that that that that this partnership that we have uh together amongst these different organizations um together with our capacity to be really on the ground uh and as many like gaby and william also and and and wane mentioned the ability to connect with the local communities that are in vietnam going to um this has to be centered around and that are going to make it sustainable uh iski and and i think that's kind of the the the secret source that we have here um but i just wanted to pause a little so why do we uh see such a big opportunity in bringing innovation and technology to solve this is number one as as wane said i mean if we look at the amazon itself um it's the largest biodiversity region in the world and it's distributed among six countries in in south america also incredibly rich because of its people and and and all the different local communities and and we see that bioeconomy as a topic has has grown in recent years um that now we have proven models like galiados that show how you can generate financial income and economic growth using using biological resources in in a sustainable way uh without compromising future generations but i want to sort of emphasize why we want to kind of double our efforts here um and this sense of urgency um if many of you have heard from tomas lovejoy the the professor at jock mason university and and also the brazilian carlos nobro the coordinator of the national uh institute of science and technology um for climate change and and they carried out a study that shows that the amazon bayon may suffer irreversible losses due to deforestation um it's already reached 17 percent in the last 50 years so um in a way we don't have a lot of time uh we are very close to kind of losing that amazing uh an essential asset for for for the entire world so so we're making this a a priority uh now the areas where we are i think uh i i like what we said about and going deep uh because we could tackle many many of the challenges related to this but we're trying to uh bring solutions that are focused on number one uh assisting the amazon countries in reducing the pressure on forest ecosystems two uh supporting small um and medium land users um like indigenous communities and and the communities that um uh uh way mentioned uh third and together with public private and and civil society have frameworks and upscale economic solutions so create also the system not just looking at point solutions but creating the system that can help them scale and and finally supposing one health and these are the risk management approaches in in amazonian um territories um to to integrate sort of risk management governance and and and public policies so um so very uh very excited to continue to grow these and go deeper in in addressing these these four areas together thank you reine um and yes thank you also for for the ibdb lab support of the work we've been doing with uh a plank and trillion trees to to support some of these entrepreneurs uh like wane and and as you say the importance of taking that holistic view so at once going deep but at the same time having the system's view and the holistic view um so i'd love to continue our conversation but we're uh coming to the end of this session already and in closing um i hope that you've all been inspired uh and seen some of the opportunities that are there of course these value chains are not the only angle i mean as erine as you just reminded us there is an urgency to tackle deforestation conservation and restoration at scale and value these value chains that we've been talking about are one of the angles uh that can help us get there and so in closing i'm really delighted um to share with you that we are today announcing the cohort of our 2022 amazon bioeconomy uh uplink innovators uh you've heard from one of them just now and this year we have selected a new cohort um and so uh i'd like to thank our panelists and to close show you the video that presents our 2022 cohort thank you thank you