 the quite engaged and doing exactly what we are supposed to do, talk to each other throughout the day. So please find your seats and in case just some housekeeping rules, we are in the middle in the heart of a research institute, Stockholm Environment Institute. We have around 80 to 90 researchers out here and they enjoy some quiet space a little bit longer and they will also join us during the lunch. So I want you to kind of try to co-live with us all and be smoothly because it is a bit of a difference when we have 40 more people in this venue. And that was just housekeeping rules. If it starts to fire, you get out where you came in and we are collecting outside here. Yes, with that, I would. So with those kind of practical observations, I would like to welcome you all to this seminar that we are happy to organize on the International Day for Forest. And my name is Madalina Fugde and I am directing a SIDA financed network called SIANI, which is a Swedish International Agriculture Network Initiative. And we work towards food security and nutrition and sustainable agriculture. And of course we are aligned with Agenda 2030 and all those goals that interlinks to make it possible to see zero hunger by 2030. But to do so, we have to do it in a sustainable way and we can't do it without taking a broader picture, a broader approach and collaborate forest and water and all the other resources that is necessary for us to achieve those goals. We decided to collaborate with Fokali already in 2013 and we started to work with what we call landscapes and agroforestry because that's where we have our common ground. And more and more we see that we are so much interlinked that we cannot really work without each other. So that is SIANI and as said, you are at SEI, SEI is a global research institute and we work with these kind of questions as well in interdisciplinary way. We have a global network of research centers and in all we are 220 researchers working towards sustainability and working a lot with climate change as well. So with that, I will with warm hand let Maria take over from here. Thank you, Madeline. So my name is Maria Ölund, I'm the coordinator of the Fokali Research Network, started with a focus on forest climate and livelihood issues and it has broadened a bit thematically since the start of 2009. So we are celebrating 10 years this year. We are sort of Swedish based network with researchers, I usually say from Lund to Luleå at different research environments working together because we realize these are challenges we have to work across disciplines and also across sectors. And that's why we are doing this type of dialogue events with SIANI and other partners. And Fokali have a secretariat that is based in Gothenburg, so I'm based at the University of Gothenburg at GMV, the Center for Sustainable Development, a platform between Schalmers and University of Gothenburg for Sustainable Development. And welcome to all of you and as I saw when you filled in the registration and expectations and so on, we are all here because we are interested to see how we can work together on halting the forestation. But how can we really do that and how can we improve our collaboration around this shared challenge? As you all know, we are facing unprecedented challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, land degradation and poverty and vulnerability. As recently in Mozambique, it's a very tragic cyclone for instance. So we have very big challenges ahead of us to work on. And as you know, youth around the world are raising their voices and demand more action from us all. And it can be easy to feel despair when knowing how serious the challenges are. But as Greta Thunberg said in one of her now world famous speeches, when we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. So that's why we are here today. What concrete suggestions can we come up with that can step up action and actually make a difference? That's why we put together this initiative, the meeting and why we arranged the first meeting in December focusing on the future of the Brazilian Amazon, that event. And we hope there will be many more dialogues to come. We hope that we can in the afternoon or noon also reach some concrete outcomes from this workshop based on the discussions. And we want to see this as a part of a longer process and not just a very nice celebration on the International Forest Day, which we will have. We will have nice meeting, mingles, nice international food and so on. But we want to be able to dig deeper into this. We will not solve all issues today, of course, but it can be a step on the way, identify how we can work together on what sort of what are the major bottlenecks way forwards. We will also discuss by the end of the day how we can follow up what we start today based on the ideas that we hope can be generated in the group exercises. And the outcomes will be documented also in a sort of workshop report or brief that can be shared to inspire others to step up action. And we will together discuss how the dialogue can continue and deepen together with other actors as well, willing to be involved and take the lead on different steps we identify. We all have different strengths and experiences to contribute with from our different sectors and disciplines. And the challenges we are facing really demands us to to work across disciplines and sectors. And even if we sometimes we have different entry points and horizons, we really need to find ways to respect each other and work together on these shared challenges. So with that, I leave it to Martin Persson, who will both present and also moderate the day here. Yes. Thank you, Maria. Yeah, all ready. Happy to see so many people here. Thank you all for coming. We hope, as Maria said, that this will be a productive and constructive dialogue today on this challenge of reducing deforestation, tropical deforestation. So I'm going to moderate the sessions. We have two sort of speaker sessions, one now until lunch. For the next 50 minutes, then we'll have a break for lunch and we'll meet up just before one o'clock and we have an additional four speakers. But hopefully we're going to we've tried to really keep these presentations short, so we'll get some input from different perspectives. But then the main focus of the day is on the dialogue and on the discussion. So presentations will be 10 minutes. Maria will try to keep you within time, including me. And hopefully we'll have some a few minutes for questions after the first four presentations and similarly after the second four presentations. Did you have something to add, Maria? Yes, I forgot. We have this nice GDPR rule and we have to ask if there's someone who don't want to be in a photo, raise. It can be shared on the C&E web page or something. So raise your hand then we know we will not share your photo. OK, good. So you might be in a photo from the audience. So I'll start off with a brief presentation just sort of giving some background that I think many, if not all of you will already know, at least part of, but just to put us all on the same page and then frame the issue, the discussion we will have. We want it to be focused on sort of concrete steps that Swedish actors can take to help stop forest loss in the tropics. So we all know that this is an ongoing problem. It's some 10 million hectares or so of tropical forest are lost every year for different reasons. We know more about this than we did just five, 10 years ago thanks to increased sort of satellite monitoring of forests across the world, not only the tropics, we're getting a better, better understanding of what is driving this loss and we'll come back to some of that. This is from a recent science paper trying to see where deforestation is driven by sort of commodity expanding, commodity production, where it's more smallholder shifting agriculture, natural causes or semi-natural causes as well, wildfires and so on. We also know quite well, and I guess you all know about why this is a problem. So carbon emissions from tropical deforestation account for about 10% of global carbon emissions, so a significant contributor to global climate change. Loss of tropical forest is one of the largest threats, if not the largest threat, to terrestrial biodiversity, also a big challenge we're facing. But we also shouldn't forget that these forests are the source of livelihoods for millions and millions of people throughout the tropics. So protecting their livelihoods is also an important reason for trying to protect these forests or managing them more sustainably. And of course, the issue of tropical deforestation has been on the international environmental agenda for decades, but I think there's been really an increased discussion around these issues in the last few years, partly driven by also the private sector being more targeted around these issues and stepping up and taking commitments and so on. So we have some quite strong, some extremely ambitious, I would say, international target commitments on this. So the Sustainable Development targets, Sustainable Development Goal 15, Life on Land, says that by 2020 we should halt deforestation. That's next year, right? We have, in 2015, we got the New York Declaration of Forests, which was sort of not only national governments, but subnational governments, private enterprises, and so on, coming together and sort of taking commitments on forest protection, saying that we should halve the loss of natural forest by 2020, again next year, and end natural forest loss by 2030. And this declaration also said that we should try to eliminate deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities, such as palm oil, soy, paper, and beef products, by no later than 2020. And many, many companies, large, much nationals, have also taken these zero deforestation pledges with quite short time horizons. So extremely ambitious targets. So how are we doing? Well, maybe not so well. This is the latest numbers from the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch, based on satellite monitoring of loss of tropical forest, both due to natural causes and human causes. And in the last few years, we actually seen a spike in tropical forest loss, partly due to forest fires in Brazil, for example. So this is really a very urgent issue. We need to step up actions. If we're going to have any chance at reaching this target in something near like next year or 2030. So this is, again, the main focus of this. And why should we care about this as Swedes or as European citizens? In addition to, of course, being affected by the impacts from deforestation in terms of climate change and biodiversity loss, we are also part of the problem. And we know this, and many of you will know this as well. This is from a paper that was published yesterday by a PC student of my Florence Pendulum and some colleagues where we combined these satellite data on deforestation with agriculture statistics, international trade data, and so on to make the links between deforestation, agriculture, commodity production, and consumption. And what we see is the large share of deforestation is driven by agricultural expansion, primarily, as you know, commodities like beef, soy, palm oil, and so on. Most of this is consumed domestically in the countries where they are produced by a large share and a growing share is linked to international trade. So between a third and a fourth of tropical deforestation driven by agriculture expansion is connected to international trade. And EU is one of the biggest importers of what you can call embodied deforestation. Annually about 340,000 hectares of tropical deforestation are embedded in EU consumption of these commodities, leading to emissions of about 150 megatons of carbon dioxide per year, which is equivalent to about a six of the total carbon footprint of an average EU diet. And I think that's actually quite staggering that a six of the carbon emissions from what we consume agricultural commodities is due to tropical deforestation. Sweden is no exception. So these are the numbers for Sweden. So about 5,000, 5,000, 6,000 hectares per year, 3 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted due to Swedish consumption of beef, soy, palm oil, and so on. I should say caveat here is, of course, we don't, the trade data we use cannot distinguish between, for example, certified and non-certified products and so on. So this is some sort of indication of the risk, the deforestation risk associated with our consumption. And you will see that most of this is due to palm oil production in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, beef from Latin America, oil seeds or soybeans from Latin America and so on. So what can we do about this? Well, there is quite a lot of things we can do. One reason for holding this seminar now is also there's a consultation or has just ended an open consultation process within the EU to look at what actions EU can take to help reduce deforestation. So that's why we also wanna think, okay, what role can Sweden play in this? And I just wanna give you sort of a menu here. And then my time should be up two minutes. Yes, I'll try to keep this to two minutes then. So a lot of things are already being done and have been proposed. So of course when we discuss this issue from the perspective of sort of consumer countries, we think of what can we do on the demand side? So we can think about what kind of trade policies can we use and this can be sort of both positive and negative can be reducing tariffs on certified products or it can be creating some sort of criteria you have to meet in order to be able to export to the EU for example. This has been done within the EU Timber Regulation and the FLEC program. The EU Renewable Energy Directive has limitations on palm oil for example, being used for biofuels. We have some countries in the EU have taken this joint declaration, the Amsterdam Declaration. Sweden is not part of that currently. That could be one point of discussion today should we be. We can think about consumer policies, diverting consumption from forest risk commodities to other commodities. A lot of discussion in the last few years has of course focused on the supply chains where we can think about certification, commodity moratorium like the soy moratorium in Brazil. We have all these companies taking COD forestation pledges. How can we improve transparency? So consumers will actually know where their products are coming from and whether they contributed to forestation or not. And again here we have lots of example, we have the round table of sustainable palm oil, around table of sustainable soy. We will hear from this accountability framework initiative. We have the Tropical Forest Alliance. We have the soy moratorium. And being at SEI I have to mention the trace platform that tries to provide information on these forest risk commodities supply chains. But we shouldn't forget that we can also do things and we need to do things in the countries where deforestation is happening, where these products are coming from. So we can help with capacity building for monitoring deforestation, for forcing forest loss and so on, help support small holders to support sort of sustainable landscape and sustainable forest management. We will hear Bethes Krona from Stockholm Resilience Center talking about the role of finance as well later today. Anna Kjärvar from FAO will talk about Red Plus and what has been done there. So there are examples of initiatives here as well. So there's a big palette of possible actions that we can draw upon. So really the focus today I think should be on sort of, okay, drawing on the knowledge that's in the room, what do we know about what works here? What could be scaled up or should be scaled up? Where can Swedish actors step up their action? How can we collaborate to make this happen? So hopefully we will be able to achieve some of that. So really, I think this is sort of a call to arms. How can we do this together? One thing we will do before I let over to the next speaker. We will leave this up during the lunch break and sort of in the question sessions and so on. If you're already sitting on ideas, what we could do, then just go into this menti.com, enter this code and you can write a short note, Twitter style on what you think. This is something we could discuss and we'll bring this up in the afternoon's discussion as well. So take a look then. Please note the number and you can go in. Yeah. During the whole day. Thank you very much for listening. Now I'm happy to introduce Emily Molli from the Division for Forestry Climate at the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation in Sweden, who will give us some information on what Sweden currently is doing on these issues. And you should have a microphone as well. Yeah, I have one. You have one? Good. You're all prepared? Yeah. Should we put this in some sort of presentation mode? Phone screen mode. Phone screen mode. And then I use this one. This or this, I guess. Well, hello. My name is Emily Mollin. I have a forest management background, but I work at the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation. I'm not a civil servant, not a politician, but I report to the Minister of Rural Affairs. I'm going to give you a brief overview of policy processes that have been an ongoing or still are ongoing, that reflects on deforestation or has something to do with deforestation at the moment. First, I want to promote the US Strategic Plan for Forest. In the last five years, we had a lot of global agreements that have to do with forest and have commitments on forest and to give some structure and to be able to monitor implementation measures. The United Nations Forum on Forest, they developed a strategic plan that was adopted in 2017 on the different forest goals. It has six goals and 26 targets, so I'm not going to go into all of them, but I put up the first one, for example, because it's more quantitative. And you can see how in this slide or in this area, how it corresponds to different agreements, like the Agenda 2030, the SDGs, and of course the Paris Agreement and so on. So for structure, there is to monitor the progress globally. The UNFF is doing some work and the countries can report on this, and there are global generic indicators that are being developed this year in this area. But, yes, as many of you know, the heat is on, and of course, a lot of us with maybe a forest or ecology background why we need to work on deforestation is quite obvious, but I'm experiencing a new pressure from the climate policy side. There is, of course, both mitigation and adaptation from forest, but also just the supply side of what materials can we use, that we need, how can we use them, how can they be sustainable? So one of the aspects is that we see in the national determined contributions that countries submit under the Paris Agreement, 80% of the ones who were submitted in November 2018 had something on the Lului CF sector, land use, land use, change and forestry sector, and about 58% include specific policies on forest management. I served at the COP24 as a land use expert, and it was striking, there's this area in the COP where delegations have their pavilions where they present things they're doing, and so many countries were promoting what they were doing in forestry, and forest management and conservation. It felt really like you chose to get under right education when you were there, because there's a lot of things happening, and there's a lot of pressure. And of course, major tools, this red plus that we will hear more from Anna, later, and let's see. And then the rulebook that came out from the COP24, it has a more detailed provision, so what to include when reporting on forest and both your inventory and reporting, so it becomes more comparable and will become easier to do the global stock takes under the Paris Agreement. So we moved ahead for the COP25, no agreements could be met on the flexible mechanisms under Article 6, so that's something that we need to look at for next year, if and how land use measures will be included in the flexible mechanisms. And another one on climate is the renewable energy directive, the revised one has the sustainability criteria for biofuels, both forest-based and indirect land use change fuels, so like palm oil and soy and different ones, so there's some work being done there now. But when it comes to addressing deforestation drivers, I'm sure I don't have to explain this, and I think Martin did a good job in saying what is driving the deforestation. But I am experiencing kind of, this is the talk of the town right now in the policy circuits of the agricultural commodity supply chains, how can we address it? Then there's a lot of initiative, will to address this and because a lot of the time we find that okay, deforestation is only discussed in forest policy context, but that's not always where you can, you have the possibility to do things. But now some examples, I first want to mention development cooperation because that's of course a major challenge to create change on the ground. But also this year we at the FAO, the Committee on Forest, we asked the FAO to work more closely with co-agular Committee on Agriculture to work closely, see how to address the commodity supply chains and deforestation in relation to that. And also I think you mentioned the EU, the last year they presented their feasibility study on how we can step up actions. And there's consultation now, I think after the elections, depending on what commission we will get, of course, we will see some initiative on that because of course the EU is concerned with data that you presented before here. So this is something that there is quite a strong political will to address. I mentioned the Renewable Energy Directive before, and this is something that Sweden has been strongly engaged in. It's been very prioritized from Sweden, both the sustainability criteria for forests, or forest wood-based biofuels in Sweden, it's mainly residue streams. So that has been one of the priorities. But also on the eye look, there's a delegated act being developed now, mainly targeting palm oil, as it looks like now, but of course soy and other crops are in there. I also want you to mention the EU Timber Regulation and the FLECT. More and more countries are entering into negotiations with the EU, and finding ways to improve the forest governance in exporting countries. So this is a tool, when we discuss illegal logging, this is a tool that we had the policy for some time now, but we still haven't really seen the effects. So it's going to be really interesting to follow and monitor and see, okay, is this tool functioning the way that we want it to? Is there improvements that need to be done? But also, see the core of it, how is it going to play out when more and more countries are going to export FLECT-licensed timbers? The first one was in 2016 from Indonesia, so we still haven't really seen the potential of the FLECT VPAs. I hoped that I could ever said that we last week at the United Nations Environmental Assembly would have taken a new resolution on deforestation and agricultural commodity supply chains, but consensus could not be agreed. This is something that EU pushed, as Sweden supported, but there couldn't be a consensus on that, so there was no resolution. So addressing the drivers, especially when it's terms of agriculture, can be very sensitive. But if we live to Sweden, we have our national forest program, the government launched it a few years ago and had a dialogue process, but it's adopted a strategy and an action plan last spring and summer. And one of the five focus areas is sustainable use and conservation of forest as a profile issue in Sweden's international cooperation. This is quite broad. It ranges from, of course, exports to development, cooperation, and aid. So it's research, et cetera, so it's quite broad, but one of the aspects is, of course, sustainable management of forest worldwide and halting deforestation. So it's one of the aspects. And we started up. One of the things we did is to task the Swedish forest agency and I think Anders Malmer will tell you a bit more about that later. And that's gonna be a continued work. But from Sweden's perspective, we do try to work into the forest policy context, but we are also working to halte deforestation in energy policy, in climate policy, in, well, finance and agriculture. There are so many different spheres, so I can't really, I tried to point at some of the aspects where we work on it, but it's not only in forest policy where you can actually move a bit. And for today, my personal reflection is that there are many positive and promising steps being taken globally to improve sustainable forest management, but of course deforestation and forest degradation is still a major problem. And we really need to see how we can get moved forward while also supporting rural development and sustainable local livelihoods. And I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts and look forward to today's discussions. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then we'll start on that. Thank you very much, Emily, for that overview. If you have questions, please note them down and either take them, you know, approach Emily over lunch or bring them up in the afternoon, but we'll move on in the program. Next up is Anders Malmöld, who is the International Coordinator for Swedish Forest Agency and the Professor in Tropical Forest Forestry at SLU. So welcome Anders. I hope this one works, it does. Thanks for inviting me. It's good to be here. I especially enjoy that I see a lot of young faces here I have not seen before. I've been around in this kind of discussions for more than 30 years and they have often tended to be with old men like me. I hope there will be a change. My title is Promoting Forest Values to Combat Deforestation and to Restore the Greater Landscape. I will talk a little bit about that title and a little bit on what are we doing at the Forest Agency. There is a major problem today and basically, especially in Brazil, the land has a higher economic value without the trees. And why is that? I mean, we need a lot of wood and fiber for a bioeconomy. The alternative is conservation and it's valued in another scale. So there we have a major problem. Forest or agriculture or commodities and it's the size of Europe basically. And in the midst of this, we have a lot of poor people actually, even in Brazil who lives in these landscapes. So can we focus on how social, economic and ecological values can balance for the agenda, for example. And I'm focusing a little bit on can value from the forest be created to maintain forest cover for multiple purposes. The last point, what are we missing? And Brazil is a very special case where we have a lot of drive for the commodities. They are presently more valuable than producing trees and forest. The same thing in Asia, oil palm is more lucrative than growing forest. At the same time, we have a growing bioeconomy that demands fiber supply other than those commodities, soya maize, cotton and meat. And we have a need for livelihoods for millions of rural peoples who need outcomes from this. And the commodity side is often very, very large scale. And how can we balance all these? There's a lot of these goals who relate to this problem we're discussing today. So what is the role of the government in Sweden, Swedish Forest Agency? Well, we know about governance for conservation. We do that in Sweden, but our major role is actually to balance all values of forest, to sustain socially economically and ecologically sound use of forests. And I just put in a few examples of kind of what we do in Sweden. We have all these values and we have different actors who promote those values and we are not always agree about how to do that. And that is important, but it's important also that we have a transparent way to address those values. It's a eucalypt plantation in Bahia with a mosaic of restored Atlantic rainforest. It's Matto Grosso, large scale agriculture, but with a corridor for the jaguars in Brazil, yes, to walk between different forest areas. And it's a mosaic pasture landscape from Honduras in this case. How can we promote this? And this is, if we act internationally, if we would work on the national foresters program, we would work with our counterparts in other countries about having good policies, transparent processes on how to balance values and so on. So, and the background for this is interesting. We're talking about this shadow of climate change, combating poverty, need for social, economically and ecologically sustainable land use for a lot of commodities that we need for the bioeconomy to get rid of fossil fuels and stuff. In that sense, we see a general increase of international interest for Swedish forest sector, both in my earlier work at SLU and now at the forest agency. We have bilateral contacts. People will like to come to see the forest sector. How do we work in Sweden? Kazakhstan will come in May, for example. We have a new MOU with India and so on. This also coincides with what Emily mentioned about the Swedish forest program. The profile, it should be more of a profile issue and this is new. It has not been before, not in development support and not in foreign policy either, but it should be now. We are glad to see that. And the Swedish policy for global development through again that 2030 also formally says that we have the competence and the experience. And now I'm not only talking about the forest manager. This is about both the biodiversity conservation, the civil society, their role and so on and how we work with that in this country. What are we doing now? We have continuous dialogues and we represent the government in a number of continuous processes in EU, in international convention, forum on forest and FAO and so on. So those are sort of, we are there representing Sweden in meetings and so on. And of course, others, civil society and others are also those meetings, but we sort of represent Sweden in those, the government, the policy. We have a project with Albania. We have had for two years now for a sector dialogue with Ethiopia, together with SLU. We often work with SLU and others. And interestingly, we have a new dialogue in cooperation with the secretariat for infrastructure and environment in Sao Paulo, state Brazil. And this is done with SLU. Sivi is on, Fokali is on a little bit. With the National Forest Program, this state government in Sao Paulo was invited to Sweden and met some 10 actors in Sweden. And in May, we are traveling there to continue this dialogue and cooperation. This is very important because this is maybe the bad guy. It's the government in Brazil, but it is the state who is most progressive in Brazil who have law and order and transparency in these issues. And for them, it's very important that we work with them. So if more actors are interested in this cooperation, we welcome that and we can see what we can do with it. We are also developing new activities together with SIDA funding. We are developing an international training program for locally controlled forest restoration, a governance and market oriented approach for resilient landscapes. We will work with organizations in poor countries to develop their efforts to do bottom-down restoration. Many initiatives are top-down with lots of money coming in, risks for land grabbing and whatever. We will strengthen partner countries in this aspect. We have a new program just coming up together with SLU and Eco Innovation Foundation, where we will work with Ethiopia and support them in their new strategic forest sector development plan, which is extremely interesting. You know, things are happening progressively in Ethiopia now. The Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation is actually preparing an MOU with the same Ministry in India. SLU and Forest Agency have trained forest officers in India for many years, paid by India. Now we want to continue this cooperation on the research and governance side. We'll see what will come up with that. I think that's what I have time for. Thank you. Good input and staying on time. So we have time for our final morning presentation, which is from Maria Rydlund, the Senior Policy Officer for Tropical Forest at the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. That's two to two weeks for getting in more calmly now. Thank you, Maria, for coming and the floor is yours. Thank you. Last, but maybe not least, but with less time. So I tried to keep it short. This was a really difficult topic, actually, because how do you describe the role of civil society? For me, it's a key actor, since I'm also representing the civil society. So I tried to pick some examples, and let's see. Shall I? There we go, sorry. It's my finger. So I'll just give a short introduction. SS&CY is the biggest and oldest environmental organisation on this stage today. Yes, since 1990 we have a global programme with supporting civil society organisations in tropical countries to support them, to strengthen them, to actually take action in their own context, but also to do it jointly with us, us being placed in EU or in Sweden or wherever we try to identify as an actor. And we focus specifically within the Tropical Forest programme that I'm heading on Indigenous and local communities' rights to forest. It's a lot about tenure. It's a lot about securing tenure rights. It's a rights-based approach from bottom to top. And promoting Indigenous and local knowledge is a key thing, because there's so much knowledge that somehow being reacted in certain arenas, and I think that we have a really key role to open up a platform for all actors, all stakeholders to actually participate, but also specifically right-holders, because Indigenous communities are in so many cases rights-holders, which is different from actually being a stakeholder. And some part of the work that we do is, of course, addressing the causes for deforestation, such as logging, and the plantation sector, palm oil is dominating. And in Indonesia, we work with Friends of the Earth Indonesia. It's more than 440 local organisations all over Indonesia. They have a key role now in the upcoming election process, promoting a sustainable development, a rights-based development. So they are really a key actor in their context. And we also work with non-timber forest products actions programme in Indonesia. There are so many other values on forest. It's not just the cubic metres that you can get from the forest. It's all the other stuff that we call for non-timber forest products, which is also part of the ecosystem. And Tuk Indonesia just came out with a report on the 25 tycoons dominating the oil palm sector in Indonesia. The linkage between financially strong actors, the development of the oil palm sector, and how it also is being financed from abroad, but also naturally by huge banks promoting this sector. And how does that relate to deforestation? I'll come back to that later on. So this is a picture you wouldn't have seen for like 20 years back. So hard to step down, 1998. This is NGO activist colleagues from Wali working together with Jokowi, the current president. So within a few days, actually April 17, the upcoming election is taking place. And Jokowi is one of the presidents that really opened up for the civil society to participate, to design the future for also Indonesian forest, but also the forest-dependent communities. And up till now and still, there's been a huge struggle for the civil society to actually detect who is logging and where are they logging and is it illegal logging that's taking place that affecting communities? So the civil society has been pushing for one single map. As the civil society organization, you be pushed to come up with your own map in order to take up a case of deforestation adjusting to local communities, because there's no map, there's no nothing like that. And finally, after years of struggle, it all took the starting point for 2011. So it took a few years to get, to come up with one single map for all the different extractive sectors that actually affect the natural forest. So it was launched in December last year. And I took one example because we've been touching on how do we deal with illegal logging from here? We define, we set up certification schemes, we try to trace, so at least stop illegal logging to at least stop us from consuming illegally logged forest resources. And Indonesia was first, Emily, I think you mentioned in 2016, and there was roughly 32,000 licenses during the first year of legally logged timber being exported out of Indonesia. And that is a huge process taking place, a huge and massive confirmation actually of a more sustainable logging industry in Indonesia. It's kind of, you get a kind of acknowledgement for all the work that's behind that process. But just recently, almost nine months back, a report was launched by the Independent Forest Monitoring Network in Indonesia, revealing the fact that actually a number of these permits, 54 of these permit holders was still conducting illegal logging. And now we are focusing on the western part, eastern part, sorry, of Indonesia, Papua mainly, where we actually have pristine forest left where all these initiatives are so important to not contribute to further forest degradation or illegal logging. But still, despite the EU timber regulation, there was boundary conflicts, although there were maps in place, there were weak forest protection for different reasons, poor management, poor logging methods, and specifically low recognition of people's rights in these areas. So therefore, the civil society is a key actor to actually monitor. We can build all these systems, we can put them in place, and we can acknowledge them officially, but we need someone monitoring what's going on underground. And there is where the civil society comes in as a very, very strong actor. Communities, adjacent to these legal logging companies, they can monitor, they can report. So what we and our partners also are doing is creating tools for communities to actually actively take part in this to support the way that we can consume timber and forest products in a more sustainable way or however we define sustainability. So this is just to show the importance of someone monitoring on the ground. This report just came out very recently, what causes deforestation in Indonesia today. And I think it's really interesting to see that the small-scale agriculture and small-scale plantation sector is taking a kind of very interesting, but still scary, almost lead in this deforestation process. The grassland consequence of forest fires. So you can see the peak when you have forest fires and the grassland causes deforestation, but actually small holders. And these are poor in certain contexts, but they also marginalize in this process. But what it's also important to know is that they're often part of the large-scale oil palm plantation sector. So although we work with tools like certification, RSBO for example, which is the most well-known, there are all these things happen on the ground. For farmers, they're not providing any alternative as a cash crop. It's mainly oil palm being promoted. And for civil society organizations working with food sovereignty to a diversified agriculture sector, these are key people for them to target to actually approach them and strengthen them, give them some kind of power in these processes so that at least a free will can be part of the palm oil sector and by being so also conducted in more sustainable agriculture, this context of oil palm. And I just want to highlight, since we're going to discussions today, I think the gender justice perspective is really a key thing when you talk about forest resources. Forest is often not owned, of course, as you know. It's about 10 years, but many structures are still very unjustice and in many, many communities, male dominated. And specifically now a focus for civil society organizations in Indonesia is to focus on gender justice and focus on women's rights. Many of these processes, we build up mechanisms like free prior informed consent in order to get the communities consent to conduct logging or set up a plantation or whatsoever, but very seldom we look into in detail how these processes are functioning. And in many, many cases, too many cases, women are not there. Although we know all the science that we have is backing up the fact that if women participate in forest management, we also secure diversity, cultural diversity, income generating activities, et cetera. And we also support informal markets which is creating a much better livelihood for people than actually being part of their expert market. That is not the only way in order to gain income and get out of that extreme poverty and actually be more independent. And just to finalize, I think also what we work with with our partner NTFP actions program Indonesia, very complicated name, is also to look into all the other alternatives. This is not a marginalized sector, but it has been marginalized due to the fact that the dominating sectors are taking over. There's a lot of potentials for actually develop non-timber forest products which create local and national income generating arena. But this is often neglected because we count timber and qubit meters and forget about all the different alternatives. Just to finalize, I just read this article now since we're also talking about Brazil. I think what we often forget is also that people in indigenous communities, they are the one that are being most affected by the deforestation. But they also, the ones that hold knowledge, that hold rights, and I think that it's very important when we talk how to tackle deforestation is also to include the right holders, not turn them into stakeholders. They are unique right holders and create the platform. Sonja, she ran for the vice president in the election just recently, but I think what she says is really a key thing for the work that we're gonna do. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much, Maria. We'll take time if you can hold your stomachs for lunch for a few minutes. We can take two, three short questions. Somebody has, so just raise your hands and I guess we'll have to put this around. One there as well, okay, good. Any questions? Everything crystal clear. Maybe I can start, okay, now hands are starting to come up. So Anders, you start. Well, it's good if other people ask questions also. I'm just curious, Maria, you worked in Indonesia. I did that before a lot and the grasslands are still increasing, I see. When we talk to our colleagues in Indonesia, they say they have a new bold community forest program for 13 million hectares. Are you seeing something of that? I can't comment on that particular, but what is, I mean, did you link that to the grassland expansion of the grassland or how to tackle that land? Part of that mission is about restoration, at least officially. I mean, the situation right now is that we have the peak in relation to the forest fires. So that is part of the whole package of how to deal with the restoration of the forest in general. And previously, you've said that the grassland, like abandoned land, you can turn it into plantations, but since the aerial has increased that much, it's also a need to look into how do we forestate these areas again and how do we make it into arable land if that is the case? You really have to do the landscape planning more, more detailed than before because now the area, as you saw on the graph, they're really increasing. So part of that is really necessary to address how to deal with it. So it's not just an area that happens to be so you can turn it into plantations. You need to think in the landscape perspective and how to actually deal with it in a more long lasting way. Thank you. More questions? Everybody's hungry for more? Okay. Hi, thank you for all the presentations. It was very good. I just want to make a point about monitoring that you mentioned that's something that people normally, it's not very much talked about and it's very important. It's one of the key factors that made deforestation decrease in Brazil. And now with this government kind of, well, we don't know if you're going to have resources for this and the Funda Amazônia, the Funda Amazônia was quite, it's being quite important for this because EMPI has large projects funded by Funda Amazônia. So that's something important. I think that the structure of the Funda Amazônia is working quite well, although it's difficult to, because, yeah. Maybe you can mention something about that. Yeah, I'm honest about that. Yeah, the Norwegian has created a fund, a large fund that is administrated by the Development Bank in Brazil. And then we, the Brazilian organizations apply to this with a project. And some of these projects are quite big, like EMPI had one of $6 million to develop the, enhance the monitoring for land use and the many, I even had a part of this and now they had another one extending to other biomes. So it's quite, it's working. And many other local organizations and civil society organizations are also applying to use this. It's very bureaucratic, it's not perfect, but I think that's a good way of connecting to, well, to actuals on the ground. Any more questions? Yeah, okay, it's Mayran and then... Right, just briefly on, because we didn't mention the word traciability here yet. And I think I'm not an expert in logging, but I know that the most common thing in Brazil, having heard from any civil servants on the ground, there's well laundered illegal logging that becomes legal along the way and becomes everything you want certified. And if you hear from those guys how it's done, it's a bit, you know, pathetic even. They just talk to the computer guy that can kind of hack the program from within. And then you just issue a number of licenses for as much wood as you want, no matter where it came from. So I think it's going to become more and more important to ensure that what we're calling certified wood or legal wood indeed is what it's being sold as. Someone down here had a question? All right, I could just add to... Okay, all right, yeah. I could just add to that. Yes, I'm Rosa Goodman from SLU. I've been in Sweden for two years, but I've worked a lot in logging concessions and I can verify that a lot of the legal logging industry definitely supports the logging industry. Like you can get credits, even certified concessions, get credits and then they sell them. And so everything that comes through Peru has paperwork. And I also really caution against saying certified is sustainable, neither is real sustainable, or reduced impact logging. And I'm pro forestry and forest management, but I actually started working with EcoInnovation recently because we don't see any examples of sustainable forest management in the tropics. And so it's a bit depressing, but it's also really a point that we need to work on because I hear all the time, if logging is, if forestry is done sustainably, then you have a business plan that supports natural forests, but I don't see that happening. So I work also a lot with carbon accounting and we always are promoting the sharing debate because forestry concessions can resist deforestation often better than natural protected areas, but it's always temporary. And there's always like this anxiety of what's going to happen after two rotations because they're basically depleted of all the large logs. So any burning question before lunch? Yeah, Malin, and I think that will be the final before. Yes, Malin Gustafsson from Fokali, Emily, just a short question. You mentioned, I will not frame this correct, but there was no consensus in the UN work with deforestation and agriculture. You know what I'm talking about then. What were the main problems? Because I think maybe that's somewhere we could start today or have in the back of our minds today. Well. Does it help for the room? So please speak up to everybody here. Well, I got this through my colleague who was in Nairobi last week, but there seem to have been mainly issues on seeing the differences between legal logging, legal deforestation and illegal deforestation and how to differentiate on that. So how to address deforestation that is part of a development plan by a government, that seems to be one of the issues that we need to look more into. That's my impression on what was the more burning thousands of issues. Yes. So thank you for the first session. We'll have more time to discuss over lunch and in the afternoon. I would like to welcome Akis from the gastronauts that received the White Guide nomination last year. You can tell us more about what is gastronauts and what we will have for lunch at the International Day of Forest. Absolutely. So thank you for having us here today. Hi everyone. I'll keep it very, very short so you can go eat. At gastronaut what we do is we work exclusively with immigrant chefs who cook exclusively food from their home countries. So Chinese chefs who cook Chinese food, Greek chefs who cook Greek food and so on. And the reason we do that is two reasons. One, when a chef has a connection with the food they're cooking, they grew up with it, they have a passion for it. They can really offer superior craftsmanship from scratch to have a really good quality final product. The second reason is because we believe that if we didn't do so it would affect your eating experience and what I mean is if someone has never been to Greece but has been to a lot of Greek restaurants they would naturally assume that Greeks eat meat and tzatziki. I'm from Greece. I can tell you that the largest part of Greek cuisine is vegan and vegetarian and we don't eat tzatziki everyday. We eat tzatziki when we also go out to restaurants. Also Chinese food, you go into a Chinese restaurant and you get fried noodles, fried sprinkles, quite oily let's say fried food and that's not actually a good representation of Chinese cuisine. Let us not talk about fortune cookies which are an American thing, not the Chinese thing. I just wanna highlight also that when you're there from Gastronaut like you have today you contribute directly to creating jobs, integration opportunities and economic sustainability for immigrants directly. And that means that our chefs have the opportunity to be self-sustainable and have a very respectable living within approximately three months of landing in Sweden. According to our partner, Albedsfamenningen, it usually takes about seven to eight years to achieve that and we're very proud to say that with the help of our clients we can achieve that in just a few months and it's not the charity when you're there from us, it's not the donation, you actually create jobs for people that pay taxes and they're equal citizens in this society. All right, yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna keep you longer. So today we have Chinese food, we have a Gagnam dish from China which means above the river, a vegetarian dish. We have handmade dumplings, everything made from scratch, even the skin of the dumplings is made from scratch and we have rice wine braised mushrooms, also a Chinese dish, so today we have a Chinese theme. There's dietary information, there's food signs for every food so you can locate what is vegan, what is vegetarian and at the bottom there's a detailed list of ingredients if you have any allergies, so you can self-control. Yeah, there's no peanuts, there were a few people that have no nuts at all, I think. Yes. There should not be. There are no nuts, but I have to say that our food may contain traces of allergens, exactly, exactly. Traces, yes. And so the two vegan options and one vegetarian. And one vegetarian. So the vegans can maybe go first in line and pick the food they want. And I want to say we will have a link to the US in about 40, 45 minutes, but we can try to resume 10-2. But I'm sure it will take a few more minutes, but we will link up to the US right before one, so that's why we have to get back. Madeleine, yes? Yes, yes. Why you do that, you can come in here and you can add your ideas. And this can be existing initiatives that you want to collaborate on or new ideas or like just brainstorm, don't fear, add it up. Yeah, anonymous.