 My name is Davison Gumbu. I am a regional scientist with the Centre for International Forest Research responsible for the Zambia Country Office where we have been focusing primarily on charcoal production as well as creating or developing a monitoring reporting and verification system for the Zambia. This entails primarily providing additional evidence to the government in terms of the status of forest resources in one site here in Zambia. In this site is the Njimba District. The charcoal scoping study was driven by the need to provide evidence to the general public on where the charcoal was coming from, who was producing the charcoal, how the charcoal was being conveyed across the country and what policy options needed to be taken. If you read any average document in this country it will talk about charcoal as a major driver of deforestation but what has not been done in the process is to kind of say what is driving that production itself, who is doing it and why they are doing it. So we set out to prove that, to look at the socio-economic implications of charcoal production in addition to what is already existing which is more to do with the ecological issues pertaining to charcoal. The findings have been varied but primarily focused on the issue that charcoal is produced widely across Zambia and wherever there are trees people are producing charcoal. It is an easy business to get into. There are no tenure constraints in terms of where you cut and what you cut and as a result people use it as a safety net and as well as a major source of income for the household. I think the reaction we got was that they are going to run a charcoal endeavor, a national meeting to discuss some of our findings as well as other work that has been done on charcoal. I think we saw in the last couple of months I think that there has been an attempt to actually address charcoal issues by government but primarily from a point of view of law enforcement. The Nyemba Forest Project is a USAID funded project primarily meant to generate additional evidence for use by what we call the NJP or the National Joint Program which is addressing red preparedness in this country and red being reduction in deforestation and degradation. We have two main thrusts really that we are looking at. One is generating a sub-national MRV or Monetary Reporting and Verification Program that will focus primarily on the district level. Two, we have also discovered that it is not worthwhile just to develop that sub-national MRV if you do not look at what happens at the coming level. So we introduced in this case participator forest inventory at the village level to complement what we are doing at the district level. The data are just coming in at a very early stage and I think that maybe by March we will have a comprehensive dataset. The signals we are getting from the local level is yes we want to use this data, show us how to use this data so that we can make better management decisions of our forests. I think that is a challenge we are facing at the moment. I think at different levels people appreciate the project in terms of data generation. It is well understood by surprisingly by the traditional authorities who think they will use the data for bargain purposes. At community level just knowing where your resources are seems to be the most important issue coming out of the project. I think we also noted that as we were carrying out the various inventories some of the species that the communities thought were no longer there we actually discovered that they were there. And in the process we also found a lot of illegal activity which clearly showed that these forests are still alive and they have got resources that communities can use. I think what we have done so far I think misses only a few issues that I think need refocus. The one area where we really need refocus is a better understanding of deforestation in this country. We need to start off by actually saying what is deforestation, get it defined, get it better understood and see how it fits in within our present understanding of research. The second issue that I also consider very important is that we see a situation whereby there has been a lot of studies done. But because research has been limited we are basically recycling the same information and arriving at the same conclusions. I think a typical case is Chaco where everybody says Chaco leads to forest loss. But when you look at Chaco very closely where does it take place it is done in conjunction with agriculture expansion. So the question is what is it Chaco that comes first or is it ag expansion. So these are some of the issues I think personally we should now be looking at instead of just simply stopping at those studies that have been done and recycling the information in those studies.