 We are trapping as much heat in the Earth's system every day as would be released by 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here for this special session on the Amazon and its future. Last year, as you all know, was an extraordinary one for the worst possible reasons in the Brazilian Amazon. It reached urgent public consciousness in a way not seen for years. There were thousands of fires. Most of them thought to have been started for the purpose of clearing land for crops or grazing. And in the middle of all of that, seven Amazonian countries, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname, signed a new pact aimed at protecting the rainforest. At the time of the fires, however, many experts pointed to deforestation as the core issue for the Amazon. And this session is dedicated to exploring how the rainforest, whether in the Amazon or elsewhere, can be safeguarded in a way that also secures sustainable livelihoods. Please do tweet your thoughts using the hashtag WF20 as well. So let me introduce the panel. Delighted to have them all with us. Ivan Duque is the president of Colombia, elected in 2018. He hosted that summit in September last year, which resulted in in that seven country pact. Dr. Jane Goodall is the primatologist best known for her work on chimpanzees in Tanzania. Her institute has been involved with projects to combat deforestation that benefit both local communities and forest dwelling wildlife. And she's also an ambassador for the trillion tree project that has just been announced. Al Gore, vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. His film An Inconvenient Truth was really a landmark in the whole discussion on climate change, a key moment about the raising of awareness. And he's on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum. And Carlos Afonso-Nobres, a leading Brazilian climate scientist, director research of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He wrote at the end of last year that we are at a moment of destiny for the Amazon as it moves from being a carbon sink to being a source of carbon emissions. So a warm welcome to you all. President Duque, if I can start with you, tell us of your perspective on what was happening primarily in Brazil and Bolivia last year, but also very much on your doorstep. Let me begin by saying that, as I expressed this morning, the greatest issue or challenge of our time is climate change. So if we really want to, as a society, be able to contend the effects of climate change, we need to protect the tropical forest. And the important thing about the Amazon is that the Amazon hosts 50% of the world tropical jungle, one fourth percent of all the species in the world. And in Latin America, we have almost 6 million square kilometers of Amazon basin. A country like Colombia has 35% of its territory in the Amazon. So for us, protecting the Amazon is a moral cost. And what do we mean by protecting? We have to defeat deforestation. In most of Latin American countries, in the last decade, we have been losing a lot of tropical jungle. In Colombia, we were losing something close to 200,000 hectares per year in the last decade. So when we took office 18 months ago, we decided to put this issue as one of the most important elements of our development plan. We have been able to reduce deforestation around the country, but we also made a big call to other nations to have a new pact at a presidential level where we commit to 16 objectives, sharing information, fighting deforestation, and be able to have a reforestation plan to recover the areas that have been lost. So for example, in Colombia, we have made a commitment that is now linked to this great initiative from the World Economic Forum of 1 trillion trees. And we expect to plant 180 million trees before 2022. And something that is crucial, we want to launch a strategy that is going to be called biodiverse cities. So cities that we have in different countries that are either in the Amazon or in other sensible areas, those cities have to live protecting biodiversity and the environment so that we can have circular economy policies so that we can embrace produce conserving and conserve producing. Do you think that is possible to have cities large-scale habitation in the Amazon and for the forest still to be secured? In fact, there are 34 million people that live in the Amazon. 34 million people, we're talking the size of many countries in the world. So we need those societies to be able to preserve themselves, to look at the future, protecting the environment, protecting the ecosystems, and protecting biodiversity. And we also have other cities in Latin America that are close to national parks or to sensible areas. And we need the whole society to be able to protect and to learn the importance of those areas. Those things are in the Leticia Pact, and I am very optimistic that all of the countries have signed it and it is aligned with the objectives of COP25. So I think that was a major step in the environmental policy in Latin America. Carlos Nobre, you have been talking about the Amazon, talking about climate for years with, I imagine, not as much of a hearing as you are getting now. But how do you want this new level of international public consciousness to be used? Thank you very much. I think, yes, I mean, we scientists, like in climate change, science has been saying for decades warning, and then action has been very slow. For conserving tropical forests, I think it's very similar. The first paper we wrote about the risks of disappearance of the forest, the Amazon forest, was 30 years ago, 1990. However, it's important to have a very good understanding on the role of tropical forests. Tropical rainforests exist when there is a lot of rain. But also, the forests themselves create 20%, 30% of the rain. So it's a biological climate evolution over millions of years. So what we are seeing in the Amazon, fortunately, not so much in Columbia Amazon. It's near the end, there's more rainfall there. But in southern Amazon, Bolivia and Brazil, we are seeing the forest and the climate changing. We are seeing the dry season becoming longer. We are seeing dry season temperatures increasing 3 degrees. We are seeing the forest turning from being a carbon sink to being a carbon source. And that's the area of maximum deforestation. So it's a perverse combination of global heating, which makes temperature higher and also more extreme droughts everywhere in the world, in California, in Australia, in the Amazon. So this perverse combination is really pushing the forest almost to exceed the tipping point. If this tipping point is exceeded, it means that 50%, 60% of the Amazon forest will turn into a dry savanna. We are going to lose 203 billion, 100 tons of CO2 carbon dioxide, which will complicate even more global heating. We lose the climate stability. The Amazon forest is a climate stabilizer for the climate in South America. It produces moisture that feeds rainfall systems in other parts of South America away from the Amazon. So we really lose a major treasure. So we are very close to the tipping point, very close. We are seeing the elements unfolding, observing that. So our calculations, many calculators from science say if the temperature of the planet goes beyond 3.5 degrees, or deforestation exceeds 20%, 25%. We are at 17% of the total base in the forest. We are going to cross the tipping point irreversibly. So we do not have much time. We have, perhaps, 15, maximum 30 years to drive deforestation in the Amazon to zero and to restore a large area with new forests. Thank you, Carlos. Jane Goodall, we all know you primarily for your work as a primatologist and for your work with chimpanzees in Tanzania. At least that was how your work began. What can you tell us about what you have seen in terms of what works to protect the forest for the future? OK. Well, for the first years, I was immersed with the chimpanzees. And that enabled me also to be immersed in the rainforest. And there it was that I learned the interconnection of all living things, the importance of every little species in maintaining the biodiversity of an ecosystem. And for me, also, the forest provided a very strong spiritual connection. I left this amazing, wonderful period of my life when I realized at a conference in 1986 that all across Africa, the rainforest were disappearing. All the forests were disappearing in Africa. And chimpanzee numbers were decreasing. And I just felt I needed to try and do something about it. I didn't know what to do. I went to Africa because I think you need to see firsthand what's going on to talk within a meaningful way. And yes, I visited several countries where chimpanzees range. I learned a lot about the problems facing them. A major one in most areas was deforestation. But at the same time, I was learning about so many of the terrible problems faced by African people living in and around a chimpanzee habitat. In some cases, crippling poverty, lack of good health, lack of education, and everywhere with human populations growing the degradation of the land. And when I flew over the tiny Gombe National Park, where I began in 1960 when it was part of the equatorial forest belt across Africa, by 1990 it was a small island of forest surrounded by completely bare hills. And it struck me then there were more people living there than the land could support. The farmland was overused and infertile. The steep slopes had been denuded of trees in people's desperate effort to find more land to grow more food. Terrible soil erosion, the little streams getting silted up. And that's when it hit me, if we can't do something to improve the lives of these people, we have no hope of even trying to save the chimpanzees. It just won't work. And so it was in 1994 that the Jane Goodall Institute began its program, Take Care or Tokari as it's known, in the 12 villages around the small Gombe National Park, a very holistic program. Not a bunch of arrogant white people going into a poor African village and telling them what we were going to do, but a very small hand-picked group of eight local Tanzanians going into the villages and asking them what they thought we could do to help them. It turned into a very holistic program, restoring fertility to the overused farmland without chemicals, couldn't afford them for one thing. It was a very small grant from the European Union. And then as the people came to trust us and we got the Tanzanian authorities to do something about improved education and health, they welcomed other interventions that we suggested, water management programs. And then scholarships to keep girls in school during and after puberty, because it's been shown all around the world as women's education improves, family size drops, and it was the growing human population. It was the worst problem, destroying the forests in this area. And then we introduced microcredit based on Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank. And this was mainly for groups of women who could take out tiny loans for their own environmentally sustainable project like tree nurseries. Many of them had tree nurseries and we provided the seeds and they sold the little saplings. And finally, we also gave workshops to the local people on family planning. And so it was a little group of local people who went around talking about family planning, which was well received because as the baby's health improved, so the women realized that they could have better control over their lives. It worked so well that that little program is now in 104 villages throughout Chimpanzee range. And it's a very multi-layered program. Do you mind, Jane, if I ask you just to pull your microphone a little bit closer to you, because I think that would be better for everyone. But is it your belief that that kind of approach can work anywhere in the world? Yes, well, we've now, oh, that's better, isn't it, that we've now introduced that program to six other African countries, including the Amazon is one of the great tropical rainforest and the Congo basin is the other. So we have two programs in the Congo basin using the same kind of approach. And it's very sure that there are forests standing and expanding and chimpanzees and other animals in those forests that wouldn't be there if we hadn't moved in. And so we not only have the local people understood that protecting the forest isn't just for wildlife, it's for their own future. And so we've taught them the use of smartphones so that they proudly volunteers from the villages go into their forests and monitor the health of the forest. And they're very proud of this work. And so we've not only helped them understand the importance of conservation, but we've given them the tools so that we can move away and eventually they can do it for themselves. Wonderful to hear about that. Vice President Gore, your work on climate has taken you all around the world. I wonder how you see the tension where it exists and it often does between preservation and development. The Brazilian government often says it is poverty that is the enemy of the rainforest. Well, thank you, Michelle. And it's such a privilege to be on this panel. Jane Goodall has been a heroine of mine for a long time. I've had the privilege to work with her a bit in years past and it's always a privilege. Dr. Nobre has been one of my teachers. I've learned a great deal from him. And President Duque, thank you for your leadership. I've learned to greatly appreciate national leaders who understand and who take the initiative on these issues. So thank you very much. Of course, there are many things to say in answer to your question. First of all, I want to highlight one point that Dr. Nobre made. Six years ago, I do climate trainings for activists around the world. Six years ago, we had one in Rio de Janeiro and Dr. Nobre was kind enough to help educate us all and I was very grateful. He was, you know, on the television weather newscast now, we often hear them speak about atmospheric rivers. Not so many years ago, you never heard that phrase. It really came in large part from the work of Dr. Nobre. He called them flying rivers. And of course, we've completely disrupted the water cycle of the earth. We are trapping as much heat in the earth system every day as would be released by 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. 93% of that goes into the ocean and that means the water vapor coming up off the ocean is greatly increased. And it comes into the Amazon in the northeast of Brazil, typically, and makes a half circle around and then comes out near Rio and São Paulo. When I was a child, there was a toy, I don't know if it's still around called a slinky, do you know what a slinky is? I do, we probably all do, I think. One of the aha moments that I had 30 years ago visiting the Amazon and going up into the towers above the canopy, you could see a great distance and when the rainstorms would fall, if you're patient, you just wait. I was there with your partner, Tom Lovejoy. Tom and Carlos recently did this paper on the tipping point. You wait a while and then you see this mist rising from the place where the rain fell and it moves downwind. And then you have another big downpour. And it seemed to me like a slinky going across the Amazon. If it lands in a place that's been burned or cleared, then the progress is halted. And of course, when the phrase tipping point is used, what it describes is a threshold beyond which this natural dynamic will come to a halt and then the rainforest will not be a rainforest but will flip into a savannah and the ecological services provided to the entire world will disappear. Now the world can't change the management of the Amazon. Just talk to anybody in a position of authority in Brazil and you'll learn very quickly. As I did 40 years ago, no, no, this is not for people in other nations to come and tell us what we do or what we should do. And this must be respected. But I also want to point out, we do not have on this panel, I'm not being critical at all, but I do wanna point out that we do not have an indigenous person here. And I say that not out of political correctness but as a way of highlighting the fact that they live there. And they have a history of management and ownership may be a different concept but in any case they must be respected. And 30 years ago when I went, I was prepared to meet with a rubber tapper named Chico Mendez. He was murdered just before we could get there. There are people who have made ways of life in the Amazon that are not destructive and they too must be honored. And finally I would highlight of course the importance of the living species. They've been mentioned about the incredible amount of biodiversity in the Amazon. It makes it of extra importance. So one final point, I said final point, this is the final point because your question was about the relation to poverty. It's not widely understood that the soils in most of the Amazon are extremely thin. The richness is in the canopy and in the life and it has evolved over so long. That's where it's so important but the soils themselves are very thin. And so when there is a dream and a hope on the part of poor people from northeastern Brazil or wherever who come and clear the land and think they're going to have crops year after year after year, it won't support it typically. And so it's a false hope and it is not a sustainable answer to poverty. There are answers to poverty in this region. That's not one of them. May I pick up then on what Vice President Gore has said about the lens of the outside world on the Amazon and how it is perceived? I mean, notably President Bolsonaro really did not like the comments made by whether it was Gretta Thunberg or President Macron at the height of the fires last summer. So when you hear people in other parts of the world talk about the Amazon as our home, do you think to yourself, no, it is our home, the countries of the Amazon? The Amazon has maybe different ways of seeing it. In the case of the countries that are in the Amazonic region, we certainly believe that it's our patrimony, but it's also something that is crucial for the world. And I liked about the question you raised to Vice President Gore about development and about the environment. For many, many years, the environment was wrongly perceived as a cost, but it's the most precious asset we have, the most precious asset. And for many, many years, the Amazon was left behind. And I consider that the packs that were signed in the 70s were very important, but they were not really raised into the presidential level. What I liked about the Leticia Pact is that for the first time in many years, we decided to bring the commitments to the presidential level. And we decided we have to protect the Amazon because it's ours, but also because it's important for the world, and particularly facing the challenges that we face today due to climate change. So when we had the conversation last year, we said, okay, we have to prevent the fires. And it's not easy. Might sound easy, but it's not easy because in the dry season, just for the sole consequences of nature, you will face them. But what we can do to prevent is not to allow people in the Amazon to use fires for their sake of other types of production. And that's why we have to pay for environmental services, and maybe we can go to some of those communities and ask them to become forest guards and that we can make them the leaders of reforestation and recovery the land that we have lost in the last decade. And if I may say something, that's why when we have made the commitment of 180 million trees for 2022, we all suspect to go with indigenous communities and make them the leaders of that protection of the Amazon process. And when we talk about the cities that are in the Amazon, in Colombia, we have five or six. In Brazil, you have many. In Peru, you have many. Those cities that are in the Amazon need to become biodiverse cities, cities that protect, that have an ethical behavior with the Amazon and the tropical forest. Just tell us how that might work. I think you have to combine different instruments. One, you need to involve academia. So you need to involve the universities in the areas. The planning of the cities, they cannot be destructive. The way you manage water. But also the way you involve communities in production. That's why the circular economy policy is so important. Produce, reduce, recycle, and be able to create an ethical behavior of society since the very early childhood. Give me one second. And if we take those ethics to all the inhabitants of the Amazonic region, they will become the best promoters of the Amazon as a place that will protect the world from the effects of climate change. I want to turn to Carlos, because on this theme of the very practical ways that this can be addressed, you have worked on something called the Amazon Third Way. Tell us a little about it. Yeah. Well, you know, Europeans came to the tropical forest of South America 500 years ago and they could not see any value in the forest there. One hectare of a tropical forest has 200, 300, 400 different species of trees, several thousand different species of plants and animals. And still, 21st century people go cut down the forest and replace by grass, cattle, or soy. I mean, this is a terrible limitation on the potential. And fortunately, now we have a few examples. Tangible examples. So then we go back to traditional knowledge and we combine with modern science. This is what we call Third Way or Amazonia 4.0. Let's get the one good example that comes from the Amazon, the Acai Berry. So traditional knowledge for thousands of years is a combination, is a mosaic of agriculture, agroforestry, and forests rotating off all the time. And their livelihoods depend on that, medicines, food, everything. So with modern technologies, we can tap into these resources. Acai Berry brings $1.5 billion to the Amazon economy. It's more than illegal timber. It's less than only beef. It uses 5% of the area of cattle ranches. 5%, 10 times more profitable. So this is the way we should proceed. Modern technology with traditional knowledge and traditional systems, which have worked for thousands of years. And then we can really develop this new bio vision. Is a new bio economy benefiting all the Amazonian countries benefiting the population and benefiting everybody else because we're going to keep the forest standing as Jane pointed out, expanding as well. Jane, that takes us really to the Trillian Trees Project. How important is it that the trees that are planted through that are ones which will be valuable enough to go as far as possible to making sure that they are not cut down by local communities or big corporations? Well, the Trillian Tree Project, which I think is exciting because it means everybody can become involved, everybody. Everybody can plant a tree. The important thing is to plant the right kind of tree in the right place at the right time and look after it. But right from the beginning for me, it's been protection of the existing rainforest that's number one because of the biodiversity. But then what happened at Gombe when I explained it was like a little island of forest surrounded by completely bare hills. Once the local people became involved, if you fly over today, you don't see the bare hills. And the lesson we get from that is the resilience of nature. The fact that seeds buried under the ground as long as the ground hasn't been destroyed for too long have this amazing ability to come back and restore gradually and slowly expand the existing forest outwards if given a chance. So the Trillian Tree Project now acknowledges the importance of saving our existing forests and restoring areas where the forest has fairly recently gone, even in the oil palm plantations. And then finally planting the trees because the climate crisis is so terrible and we know that the more trees we have, the more carbon can be drawn down from the atmosphere and stored in the trees and in the forest soils. So it's a combination. We all need to get involved. We need to be involved. We involve children now. The children in our Roots and Tutes program in 60 countries are planting trees that understand the importance. They are protesting when an area of woodland or forest around them is going to be destroyed for yet another shopping mall. We don't need any more shopping malls. And you know, so there are these three grim, well, four actually, four grim things we have to cope with. We have to try and mitigate. And number one is poverty. Because as I've said, if you're really poor, you're going to cut down the last trees. You know there's going to be soil erosion. You're not stupid. The indigenous people have this wisdom. But you've got to grow food and you've overused your farmlands. So what are you going to do? Cut down some more trees. And so we have to do something about our unsustainable lifestyles of everybody else. And thinking about this unsustainable lifestyles, we need a way of compensating people who are looking after their forest for the benefit of us. We need those forests. We need the Amazon. We need the Congo. We need the forests of Columbia. We need forests everywhere. We're not paying for them. We need to eat less meat. We need to stop land being used for cattle and growing grain for the billions of animals that we keep in our intensive farms. And I know from experience in Tanzania, one of our biggest problems is cattle moving into the forests and destroying those forests so that they are, you know. And we need to eliminate corruption. That's something for the politicians, not me. And then finally, we cannot hide away from human population growth because, you know, it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn't be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago. I'm going to ask all four of you for a closing thought in just a moment. But before we get to that, Vice President Gore, what are the initiatives that give you the most hope that of avoiding the tipping point that Carlos Novorez says we're only 15 to 30 years away from tipping the rainforest into a dry savannah? Well, I think the young generation is a source of hope. There have been many occasions in human history when morally-based social revolutions gain the momentum necessary when the young generation takes on the cause. Greta Thunberry and she is quick to deflect to all of the others who have followed her lead and joined her in leading. This is a global phenomena that gives me a great deal of hope. And some of the business leaders that make up such a large percentage of the crowd that comes here to Davos will tell you that they cannot hire the best and brightest in the new generation unless they can convince them that their companies share the values that this young rising generation holds out to be so important. So that is a real source of hope. I wanted to comment briefly on a couple of things that were said. First of all, planting and then caring for the trees. The late departed Juan Garry Matai was a dear friend. And you knew her, the greenbelt movement. And she taught that it's not just the planting of the trees. It's the caring for and stewarding the growth of those trees until they reach a height and an age of sustainability. This one trillion tree initiative that Klaus Schwab and the Forum are promoting, Mark Benioff has been so terrific in promoting. This is an important initiative. But we're losing one football field's worth of existing forest every second. And so, yes, we have to stop the destruction in the Amazon. In Indonesia and Malaysia and the Southeast Asian archipelago and in the central part of Africa, we have to do that. One final point on the genetic resources that are so valuable. You mentioned the Asa'i. If history serves correctly, if memory serves correctly, the first really valuable indigenous resource was the rubber tree. And before the synthetic materials of which tires are now made existed, rubber was a strategic resource. But it's interesting to look at the history. It was a source of great income. But the first steamship to come up the Amazon to Manaus left with a stolen cargo of young rubber tree plants. The sailing ships could not take them back across the Atlantic soon enough to keep them alive. But the steamship took them to greenhouses in the UK the following year, transplanted to Salon, now Sri Lanka, then to Malaysia. And so the highlighting of these incredibly valuable genetic resources is perfectly, it's also a source of hope. But it triggers in the Brazilian community these memories of foreigners coming in and stealing those resources. And so this is a memory that must be kept in mind. And we have to navigate around that and respect the feelings that are still keen there. OK. So then a final thought from each of you. And you only have one minute each for this. And I mean one minute. Something that you would like to be different by this time next year, President Duque. I just want to achieve four basic results. This has to be comprehensive and it involves different actions. We passed in Colombia from less than 60 megawatts of installed capacity in non-conventional renewables to 2,250 by 2022. Next year, we want to have 30% of those projects going on. We have already reduced deforestation by 17%. We hope next year that we can get to the goal that we have established of getting close to 30%. And the third most important thing, we need to have a holistic view against deforestation. We launched the first National Council against deforestation and we launched the Artemis Campaign to fight illegal production of wood and illegal trade of species and other kind of crimes. My goal for next year is that throughout the message of the carrot and the stick sanctioning the criminals, but at the same time empowering communities to reforest and to protect the Amazon, can make Colombia the leader in Latin America against deforestation. Carlos Nobre. Yeah, one year from now, certainly I would like to come back to Davos if I invited and see that we had much lower deforestation and fires in the Amazon, much, much lower. We really start a pathway of zero deforestation in a few years. For that, it's essential to have a deforestation free supply chain, global, global. And also that the leadership of business which meet here every year and of finances also support this deforestation free supply chains and also support the emergence of this new economy, this new bio economy for all tropical forests, especially for the Amazon. Mr. Gull with a one minute reminder. I hope that the sense of urgency next year is even greater than it is this year. This crisis, the climate crisis is way worse than people generally realize, way worse. It is getting worse still way faster than people realize. The burden to act that is on the shoulders of the generation of people alive today is a challenge to our moral imagination, but this is thermopoly. This is Ajankur. This is the Battle of the Bulge. This is Dunkirk. This is 9-11. We have to rise to this occasion. We have the tools. We have the solutions. We know what to do. We lack the requisite political will. Political will for anyone who doubts that we as human beings have the capacity to rise above our limitations and transcend the difficulties we now face. Remember that political will is itself a renewable resource. And Jane Goodall, your closing thought. Well, you know, I spend my time working with young people. Young people who so often have lost hope because they read all about the doom and the gloom. They know about the climate crisis. It's very real all around the world everywhere I go. And so my hope is that we can increase the level of education and understanding, not only but especially in our youth and that we can increase the level of funding so that they can do more because the young people know what needs to be done. But very often there aren't the resources for them to actually do it. There aren't the people who will listen. So I want to grow our Roots and Shoots program, have more partnerships with other youth programs and give the youth hope because if you lose hope, you give up, you do nothing. Yeah, and surely we cannot do that. Thank you all very much. Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Carlos Nobre, President Duque. Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you.