 Hello, good afternoon and good morning from Canada. I am Freedom Kai Phillips a PhD candidate at the the University of Cambridge here and operations director for the Center for International Sustainable Development Law. What we'll be talking about here is some some outcomes from research that we've conducted over a collection of years in capacity development work with colleagues in the DRC. So what I'll be taking a look at just high level is kind of an introduction to some of this with some definitions and some background, a survey of what the relevant international and domestic instruments are and interfaces, look at some complementarity in terms of other related instruments from finance and compliance and then discuss some synergies and lessons learned. So it starts here with facilitating sustainable development. So what is sustainable development generally, right? It's development which does not compromise the needs of future generations to satisfy satisfy the desires and needs of our present generation, right? And for our jurisdiction and and our discussions here, what we're talking about is the sustainable development goals. This is 17 goals 169 targets that covered the breadth and depth of international sustainable development priorities. In terms of sustainable landscape management, this is an ecosystem based approach which allows for the leveraging of synergies between science-based decision-making and traditional knowledge to advance the types of programs and policies that are used to offset biodiversity loss or to foster conservation and sustainable use. And there's a couple of examples that we'll work through here. But I made reference to an element there, which is traditional knowledge, which raises the question of what is that? Now there's one main internationally accepted definition. It's found in article 8j of the Convention on Biological Diversity and it really can be summed up as knowledge, innovation and practices of Indigenous people and local communities. Now there are international negotiations which are ongoing in other spaces where they are trying to develop more precise definitions, such as the one provided below taken from the WIPO draft articles on traditional knowledge, which draws reference to particular sectors and applications. Now sustainable development and the recognition of traditional knowledge in many ways have had a synergistic evolution. It started with kind of a recognition of protection of unwritten works and then the articulation of sustainable development as a development priority internationally, and then recognition of folklore and then actually introduction of sustainable development as an aspect of the nomenclature of international development of discourse, right? So the Brunlin report really transformed and opened up the avenue for this type of conversation. And then you started to see the actualization of this and the set of principles in international instruments, be that from the Rio treaties, be it recognition and modalities established under the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources, be it vesting of rights from UNDRIP, or be it application of traditional knowledge, access, and beneficiary mechanisms under the Nagoya protocol. You've started to see different, unique, almost sui-generous approaches to try to address traditional knowledge and what they're actually doing are trying to advance modalities with rights, recognitions and pathways for access, which is equitable. So in terms of the DR Congo, we actually observed a collection of instruments that all worked in synergy to foster sustainable development outcomes. The sustainable development priorities were first established in refinement to their constitution, so it was established as a core priority for the country. And then over time, over about 10 years, 12 years, they implemented a range of different legal reforms. They refined their investment code. They established institutions to facilitate investment. They established their forest code that refined land tenure aspects. They had modalities for forest concessions. They had environmental protection aspects, agriculture, red plus, and nature conservation. But one that I want to dive into really briefly is this modalities for forest concessions, which gave an opportunity for local communities to define the boundary delineations of their traditional authority and their traditional territories in relation to others. It then empowered them in a decentralized governance manner to take the type of traditional knowledge and engagement with the land that they have lived traditionally and start to operationalize that under solid framework of governance. Now, why is this actually important? The point of these international instruments is to establish these norms and principles. But if we don't have pathways for congruence of practice, particularly in countries which are resource constrained or have a lot of other developmental dynamics going on, it will not happen. So in particular in Africa, what you're seeing is around a 76 percent of the income being drawn from informal sectors. So if you develop a legal framework, you need to be able to have that legal framework actually incentivize the type of conservation practices that you're talking about, which would then be juxtaposed by the informal sector, the harvesting of wood and timber to take to local market to be able to buy food for your family. So you need to be able to replace that income. And this is why creating these channels for congruence of practice are so important at the local level. Another aspect is having sufficient compliance. And two of the different frameworks that we saw, which were interesting, were of course the flight program, which allows for voluntary certification of forest timber products, and then the relationship to access and benefit sharing, the access of genetic resources and particular traditional knowledge used in either medicinal or bio-based type applications. Another aspect, which was incredible, was the role of these global landscape funds. And there'll be a couple of that I'll dive into really briefly. That'll be the Congo Basin Forest Fund and the Livelyhood Fund. These are private created instruments that allow for the investment into type of development projects to advance developmental goals and to fill gaps. Three of them were multi-million dollar, multi-year programs that helped to foster agroforestry. So this is a balancing of forest products and agricultural products that allow for a synergistic relationship in the actual agricultural process. These were really, really impactful. And this shows the type of synergies that you're aiming to create by seeing funds flow from the priorities at the international level to the types of projects that are being operationalized at the local level. The one that I always like drawing attention to is the Oceanum Project in Senegal. While it's not in DRC, it's quite exemplary because it took a localized approach, engaging over 350 communities, roughly 100,000 people, to reforest a mangrove roughly the size of Paris. And it's been invested in for over 20 years and they get guaranteed gold standard certified carbon credits out of it. So it creates a cyclical income for the community. The point of this is that operationalization of the sustainable development goals cannot be seen just in a silo, seen as a single aspect of a target within a larger framework. It needs to be seen in synergy. It benefits from horizontal and vertical integration in international and domestic law. And this integrated approach creates an enabling environment for trade and investment in biodiversity and biocultural practices and incentivizes the type of conservation and sustainable use which underpin the SDGs.