 CITES is the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species. It's one of a large family of what are called multilateral environmental agreements. And in fact it's one of the earliest that was established in 1973, ratified in 1975, and now has I think over 180 countries of the world who are signatures to this convention. One of the interesting things about CITES is it's one of the few, and certainly one of the earliest multilateral environmental agreements, which actually combines an instrument which can lead to sanctions in terms of trade in particular species. Its other distinguishing feature is it has three different appendices within which different types of species, both animal and plant, are included in relation to the degree to which they are endangered. Only 3% of all species are included within Appendix I, which is where most species are really in danger and threatened with extinction. And the vast majority of the species are listed in the Appendix II, which represents something like 96% of all the other species that are listed in CITES appendices. Now one of the reasons why it is I think of particular interest now to see for when CITES was ratified, there were only 18 tree species that were included in the appendices. And since the COP that was held, I think if I recall in February 2013 in Bangkok, this is now grown according to the CITES secretariat at the conference here in Cambridge, almost 600 species now. These are not necessarily timber species that are threatened or close to extinction, but they are timber species which are involved in regional and global trade. Well, it's very important partly because to be able to implement many of these conventions, you actually require legal teeth. If the laws themselves are weak or weakly enforced, these are clearly areas where there are scope for improvement. And I think it's also important in terms of a new stream of research at CIFOR that we actually focus more on the legal aspects. This was something of a surprise to me when I discovered that in CIFOR's 20 years history, we actually hadn't done a great deal of work on CITES specifically. That may reflect, as I said earlier, the fact that there were a relatively small number of timber species that were included in the appendices, but that has changed. What I think is now really exciting is that we're starting to see the interest across CIFOR, amongst other scientists, to look at probably two different streams of research in the future that relate to CITES, one vis-a-vis the timber species, but equally important also the wildlife trade. And some of the early work that we're doing, led by our Deputy Director General, Robert Nassie, is focusing particularly on the latter and the bushmeat trade and some early work we're doing in, I think, in DRC as well as in Columbia, which hopefully will lead to a much stronger relationship between our research and the CITES secretariat. Another theme that's come through in this conference is that many of these conventions really exist and function within their own silos, and although some of them have started, so for example, we have the Biodiversity Liaison Group, which has been set up across five conventions, as an early mechanism to try and ensure there's much greater horizontal coordination and integration and information sharing, I think there's still a long way to go to ensure we get the maximum value added from all of these different conventions. CITES, as I said right at the beginning, has the distinguishing feature of having this ability to use both carrots and sticks. And this is something that perhaps needs to be looked at, and I think this is of interest to C4 vis-a-vis our flagship program five on globalized trade and investment and adding a new dimension to our existing portfolio of research on global trade and investment and global value chain analysis and building on much of the work that's been done by Paolo Ciaruti and Gio Mleschiae in the Congo Basin countries vis-a-vis the domestic timber trade. So this I think represents an exciting new development. I think this is absolutely music to the ears of those who support the landscape approach because it does provide another way to actually take a much more synthetic systems approach to look at many of the different actors who are interacting, intervening within a landscape. And I think again with some new funding prospects in DRC we'll be able to try and translate this into something more practicable and also of relevance for future research.