 Mae'n bwysig i'r rhwng o'n most i radiwyr fel oedigaidd o'r Pawn Cymru ag ysgolion gan gyntaf. Felly, mae'r ffordd o'r ddwybl yn meddwl â'r cynghwyl yn credu o'r ffordd yna ar gyllid yn rhoi ffrif. Roedd ychydig oedd yfodol, roedd ym 不 arddangos, o'r gwneud, o'r tyfnod, mewn ffaggwrdd, wrth byd iawn. Rwy'n fawr cyffredin o'r adrodd yma yn ysgolwyr yma. Mae'r cyfan y lleidio, a'n fawr, i'r holl mwyaf yma. Mae'r lleidio yn gweld i'n fawr, i'r lleidio, i'n fawr, i'n fawr, i'r holl mwyaf, i'n fawr. Mae'r cyd-desendol yng nghylch. Maen nhw'n amddangos o'r llai ystodol o'r llai ein maen nhw ymddangos. Mae'n amddangos o'r llai ystyried, nid i'n ffyrdd ac ar gyfer y llai, mae'r llai o'r llai yn mynd yn gwyllach. Emily wedyn yn ymdangos o'r gweithiau. Mae'n amddangos o'r argylch. Mae'r llai'r llai o'r llai. Mae'n amddangos o'r llai. Cynnyddio'r gwaith i'r llyfr. Mae'n gweithio ar y cyfnod. A'n hynny'n gweithio'r gwaith i'r llyfr. Yn cyfnod, mae'n gweithio. Yn y gweithio gynnig o'r gwaith yng nghymru, mae'n gweithio'r gwaith i'r gwaith i'r gwaith i'n gweithio'r cymdeithas. So, let's see. That was the law of safe forests. From that introduction, let's see where we go. Hi. So, it is true, so it's more as my last day in this job, so it's a slightly strange time to be giving this presentation, but let's see how we go with it anyway. I've been at class after the last seven and a half years. I was, let's be clear, talked by both of these two, so for the one program of the cons, I credit them lame, but you're right. I've also missed out that she was also at my end and was part of the beginning of this program for its work. So, yeah, I mean a lot of background in that. What I wanted to do was give, just to try and give a snapshot of the work, the clientele, is there a click on? That may be asking for too much. Okay. Can I click over here? Can I press a button? May I press a button? This, okay. Give me that one, will you? Oh, it's too small. How do I make you move that? Ah! Well, that's just funny. So, even when it works in Fox, I don't really want to sit behind a desk, but I guess I can. Okay. I wanted to give a little update on the work that clientele does. I was trying to think how to do it, and the best I could think of was giving a couple of snapshots along with the methodologies along the way. To give a little bit of, the reasons for working on forests are probably clear. Let me just check. Has anyone here heard of clientele as an organisation? Okay. And does anyone here do work which connects with forests? Okay. Cool. In which case, I was going to take these three case studies, ideas, bits of work, benefit sharing, conversion and legal logging, just to give a little sense of the work that the team does. I'm really happy to take questions as we go. I'm really happy for questions at the end, whatever works for people. So, the first on why forests, there are a ridiculous number of reasons for why we work on forests. That is some of them. We did an exercise in the team a couple of days ago on, well, Friday last week, on what people's motivations were, what the kind of purpose of working on forests was. The one that came out most dominantly for the people who work in the team was environmental and social justice issues. All of them are reflected in elements of these points. The numbers are all contestable, but they're somewhere in the ballpark of something. Why from the EU or how from the EU or with which legitimacy as we work in the EU? So, the background, I started working in Client Earth, working on legal logging, working on the legal logging regulation that the EU brought in. I'll come to it at the end. It was historically the main driver of deforestation and, within that, the EU was a significant and driving market, both in terms of volume and in terms of value, so higher value for the timber that came to the EU. That's changed. 50% to 70% of trophogood deforestation now comes from agricultural conversion. Some people put those numbers higher. There are arguments for 80%. You can go each way you want. Of that, half is driven by overseas demand. There are people who, again, would argue that number was higher, and if you try and find the numbers on it, of the value behind it, that overseas demand is also higher than the half. There's a ballpark number, which is based on a lot of assumptions, which are also all contestable of more or less 61 billion US dollars being the value of those exports. The EU, from the period of 1998 to 2010, was the dominant importer for those agricultural commodities. You're talking about things like soy, palm, beef, leather, cocoa, sugar. The EU was the main market. Those market trends are changing, so the EU is becoming increasingly less important as a demand-side market for those products, but it's still very important also in terms of the value, even if the market share is going down a little. The fundamental basis of the work that Client Earth does is it's balanced on two sides. On the one hand, you've got weak forest governance, and on the other hand, you've got market regulation, which doesn't require markets to discriminate between the products that they're consuming on the basis of their production characteristics. This market here isn't capable of caring enough, and forest governance systems aren't required to be strong enough, and there's an interplay between these two. It's the reason for the interplay that the Client Earth's work is based both in the EU and the UK, depending on what the UK's position is within the EU course, and also in a sample selection of forested countries. Sample selection because we've only been doing this work for the last seven or eight years. There was a lot to learn. There still is a lot to learn. We work in depth in a few countries rather than lightly in a lot. Where are you working? In Ghana, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Republic of Congo, historically in Gabon, and then for some other bits of work around the place, then we end up working much more lightly in the DRC, in Cameroon, Vietnam, some other places. Yeah, there was. The EU has a policy framework. Step back a moment. The way that we are using the law to try and influence both the market regulation and the forest governance, it's a useful tool, but on its own it isn't enough. There isn't enough of an incentive, a hook, for the sort of work that we're doing to work in a policy vacuum. So we needed, in all cases, there to be some other mechanism, policy mechanism or trade mechanism, whatever it was, that would give us the point of intervention. In this case, what there was was a policy framework from the EU called the Flegged Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Policy, which started off doing bilateral trade agreements with particular forested countries with a view to using that as a mechanism for improving their forest governance. And so it was off the back of this that we entered into the discussion in those countries because effectively they created a forum and they created demand also for a multi-stakeholder process. And I'll come on to it the way that we've worked has been very much initially through and with civil society, supporting their legal capacity to engage. So imagine there has been a governance table, a governance forum that's been created and we've taken that opportunity to intervene. I think this picture is now changing when we started this work. A lot of the climate conversations, a lot of the commodity conversations were important, but they were slightly less tangible. This has changed a little bit, so it creates, I guess, more ways of engaging, also a little more confusion about how to engage in a way which really works. So ultimately what the project, what the team does is find ways to use law to strengthen forest governance on the one hand, market regulation on the other, but most particularly to use the interplay between the two. I thought she was going to recognise a couple of people in there. To explain also how we work in the African countries where we work, so in the EU the team has a number of lawyers who are from EU countries and based either in London or in Brussels and work directly towards EU institutions, member states with NGOs towards private sector organisations, so it's a direct working relationship. Where we are working on forest governance in Africa, one of the questions which had to be worked out was what is the role of a bunch of EU based lawyers in this? What's the legitimacy, what's the purpose, what's the function? And this was, again, at the time that Pierre was at Client Earth, and it was not a straightforward process at all to land on the mode of intervention that would work and feel right and sort of resonate with the people that we were working with in a way that the team wanted to achieve impact as well. The team came to what we call legal working groups. Effectively, our first point of intervention has been working with civil society or community representatives within these policy or legal reform frameworks to increase their willingness, ability, desire, sense of potential opportunity to engage in legal reform processes. Why? Because if you talk about doing legal reform and you give people a seat at the table, it doesn't make much difference if they don't understand the language and they don't feel that it's accessible. So the purpose really is legal capacity building to increase a sense of engagement, to increase knowledge of the law, to increase an ability to engage with and manipulates the law to represent the rights that people have and want to exert. It has meant in really basic terms the first thing that has happened in each of the countries as we've started working there is we have spent a lot of time talking to national groups, normally finding national platforms of existing civil society groups and inviting people to be part of a legal working group. It's entirely voluntary, it's entirely unpaid. It is to be useful to people who want to have access to this skill set. The mechanism of deciding what the subject matter is that the legal working groups work on is in part correlated to this trade agreements which are being negotiated with the EU but are also a question of coming upon essentially mutually agreeing a pathway. So it is the members of the legal working group that get to select what the focus of the work is. We work with a national lawyer, at least one national lawyer in each of the countries that we work with and they are partnered with a lawyer who is based either in London or in Brussels. So they are as much of a part of the team as anyone who is based in London. And it is through this mechanism that the members of the legal working group effectively have the opportunity to work on different legal issues that come up that are particularly important to these trade agreements. The trade agreements that's probably important to recognise have sort to, their purpose is to get timber to create a system which recognises timber as being legally harvested and then for the EU to be able to accept that as legally harvested timber which it accepts at face value. To do that has required in each country a complete scrutiny of what is legal. How do you judge it? How do you assess it? How do you certify it? How can you have confidence in it? And what role do different stakeholders have along the way in coming to that conclusion? It is the EU and each of the relevant countries. So, Ghana, Liberia. Yeah, exactly. Because if you do logging in those things you will never leave it for a reason because there was a law on that thing. And that's one of the things that I'll come on to because I think you've got the question of is something illegal because there's a law and it says you must do this and you do this? Or is something illegal when something is happening but there's no legal framework to govern it? Or is this a law when you've got some customary rights existing on the one hand? You've got a statutory law that exists here and there's a clash between the two. All of these are contested and contentious and contested within this process. One of the things that these trade agreements have sought to do is to reach a consensus at the national level on what legal is. Client Earth, to be very clear, was no part in creating these trade agreements. All we have done is stepped into the space that they have created to work with others in working through that. And in working through that, our role has been working very much with civil society and with community representatives to make sure that their perspectives on what is legal is part of the conversation. Each country we have started off by trying to find the law, first of all, and then try to unpick what that law is and what it should be and where the differences are in it. To an extent, not to the nth degree, so it is also, and this is led in each of the countries where we're working by the stakeholders we're working with, to the extent that they want to have that conversation, we end up having that conversation. But it is part of our job to put that on the table as an issue. Let me come on to benefit sharing because it maybe is a nice way of illustrating it. The top line stuff on benefit sharing, which you're possibly probably all familiar with, but a right to sharing the benefits derived from the use of land, which can be afforded to those who own the land or have use rights to the land. So already we get into unclear territory or territory which can become unclear very quickly. Who is responsible for making the payment? If it is a payment, it doesn't have to be a payment, it doesn't have to be money, it can be something other than money, it doesn't have to be financial. And it can be called in some countries, we talk about it as social agreements, other countries benefit sharing. Again, all of this will differ. The question of... There are many questions that go with this that you can imagine. Who is the recipient of the benefit? What should the benefit be? How is it agreed? What happens if it isn't enforced or paid or provided? What if there's a dispute about what the benefit might be or should be? What if it is provided to someone and someone else thinks it's provided to the wrong people? All of these things. Who is the community? Who is the representative? No, so this is somewhere else. So if you imagine that the trade agreement created a framework, and they're called voluntary partnership agreements. So they create a framework and they say these are the laws that need to be complied with for timber to be legal. And then it gets to the point where you go, well this is fine in principle because there is a provision in an act of parliament for a particular country that says you need to make a benefit sharing agreement if you're going to use the land. What we came across most often is the detail of how that works isn't set out. So you don't have the mechanism. You don't have the nuts and the bolts of how does this work in practice. The difficult stuff. It's easy to put an agreement for a benefit sharing agreement in law. It's much more difficult to go through the process of creating an agreement about what should it look like and how should it work. So the voluntary partnership agreements, the trade agreements have been effectively an opportunity to dig into this issue. They've created a space where you say well we need timber to be legal. Benefit sharing agreements are one of the legal requirements. But there seems to be a gap here in the national legal framework because no one really knows what should happen and even if they think they know what should happen, communities aren't necessarily doing the greatest job of representing their own interests to resolve that. So how do you go about resolving that or at least trying to resolve that, starting the process of resolving that. You should say also all of this is recognising that none of the outputs of this are 100% perfect. They are all exercises of trying to make systems better. Make the law work better for multiple interests rather than finding an ideal solution which is not challengeable on many levels. I give you a table of people who are legal working group members in Liberia working on this issue at the time for social agreements as it stands in Liberia. The background in Liberia is this. Companies have to pay land rent to communities by entering into a social agreement. What has happened and Liberia is a great example of a country which has quite a lot of law written at the top level and a very poor effort so far in having quite a lot of the law really detailed into implementing decrees that work in practice. So a lot of the framework that sits in principle, a lot of the detail is lacking. In this case the law is there and the level of understanding and knowledge of the law has been very light. So how do you get it to work in practice? How do you share information about how the law can work and should work? The legal working groups of this is members of different community organisations in this context working with a national lawyer and also working with this guy who is Jeff, who is based now in Brussels produced a set of guidance. Now again, there is a national union a national union community first development committees. It is a mouthful. This is a fantastic thing to have a starting point because it is exactly as it sounds. It is a national union which represents the interest of the development committees across the country. To understand how this works in practice because this is the union that in the first instance was receiving some of the money as a benefit the benefit from the social agreements. In practice there was one individual who was trusted by a lot of the development committees who held the bank account details for all of the money that was coming in for them. It is an interesting practice and it worked for a lot of ways. There was a lot of trust between the different development committees. It is not a system you want to break down just for the sake of it but equally what it shows is how not resilient and how much lack of depth there is in terms of the infrastructure that supports the way that this works. This is one of the things which is being worked on to have a more systematic system for distributing the benefits. I found it a fascinating snapshot of just how light touch the system was just how fragile it is effectively. There is one person who plays such a key role in a system which goes across the entire country. He is also someone as an aside who got investigated by the police because he had control of a bank account which had so much money in it. There are other issues that come out of the side of all of this. The guidance which has been produced and has been produced and is now being shared worked on disseminated people are doing trainings and others are doing training cycling it out to set out the absolute basics the nuts and bolts what is the legal framework that defines this what are communities rights what can they ask for what are the prices that they could or could be getting as a result of the use of their land Exactly so if a community is to negotiate a social agreement with a company how shall it best represent its interest how shall it best think about its representation if that isn't already something which is agreed but also what might a contract look like what could a template contract actually look like what are key terms one of the things that has often been an issue to date is they are simply not enforceable you write a lot of things down and there was nothing about what happens if the company doesn't pay what it said it would pay basic provisions which have to be tested to make sure they work of course so writing down the enforcement provisions doesn't make them work but it starts making it stronger Not brilliantly but not impossibly either and this is something which is starting in Liberia because Liberian law better than quite a lot of other countries in that part of the world have got quite strong provisions for communities to represent themselves would it happen well every time though of course not but is there a legal remedy there yes and are there enough lawyers who can begin to start working on that as well yes but no pretence there it is not a perfect system there would have to be an awful lot of fuss made to make sure that it actually works it's a balancing act so the social agreement one of the things that was one of the most contentious questions in the the template agreement which was agreed was how long should it last for how long should it last for because if you have it for longer on the one hand this works better because you think you have better security going forward but equally if the way the company exploits the land changes over time and their income from the land goes up then you can't reflect that very easily you could create an agreement the word but that would be harder so that was one of the most contentious issues as you can imagine the middle way was kind of found in terms of I think it's five years as an agreement the historic ones you have to wait for them to finish and then renegotiate so this isn't a quick fix it isn't a it isn't that all other social agreements fall and then these become the de facto method but rather it's become a template which can be used direct payment in which sense it comes to so this is that role of that one individual it goes into bank accounts which are linked to the development committees as opposed to going to the government this is one which was a slog and continues going slowly Gabon is a country that we are working in from 2012 if I want to say I'm not sure the forest code outlines a benefit sharing system it says that benefit should be shared quite simply but it doesn't say anything about the details how to agree what level should they be at all the rest of it so the legal working group working with national lawyer and our lawyer at the time worked through what they thought it should look like what were the key components what percentage of the profits that the company is making felt like the right level in 2014 and it isn't to there is a lot of chance of course with this that this sort of petition came along at a time when the Gabonese government was interested in making progress on this and where the lack of it was causing a bit of conflict so there was a purpose but the Ministry of Forestry then passed the legal text which was the implementing decree which set out a series of the provisions for how benefit sharing agreements should work in practice fine absolutely great in practice and then what do you do with it in Gabon the system is different you need the community you need the company and you also need the national regulator at the local level to agree the social agreement so unless you have those three it doesn't stand so you then the next thing that we did and we for the client earth work it was effectively training the trainers so creating a group of people who then were working with national groups across the country in different communities to do technical training on exactly how to come to these agreements the Ministry of Forestry has endorsed the guide they did this a little while ago the practice that we came to was by the time we finished one of the elements of the project there were a few of the agreements that had been signed and settled and I suppose the heartening thing that came with it was there was also an effectively a waiting list of others that wanted to get involved and wanted to start using the benefit sharing agreement and the guidance all of that has to be taken in the context however that the Gabonese forest code is contentious and changing and difficult to pin down and constantly under reform and things change at the last minute so the reason for focusing on benefit sharing has been that it is a relatively small but sharp tool it is something which directly impacts community rights, community benefit and if it works better is a tangible way of also demonstrating use or land rights or ownership rights that those communities have well that's one of the fun things which is different in different countries sometimes they can get a permit and the permit is conditional on the agreement being entered into subsequently but as you can imagine what is lacking in very many cases is a mechanism to check that when you map out benefit sharing we think of classically it started around timber it then becomes relevant to agricultural use it is being discussed and thought about in terms of carbon rights and others it is one approach which can potentially find a balance between different uses going on of the same resource or the same land but it is highly contentious and it is the mechanism by which those benefit sharing agreements are agreed and then the role that they play down the line is very contentious so it is almost simplest in the world of timber and as soon as you move away from there it gets much more complicated I wanted to talk about forest conversion a bit partly because partly because forest conversion is now the driving cause of at least tropical deforestation it's also at least for now the EU remains the largest importer of those conversion driven commodities so it is a question for this work it has been a question of a legitimacy in terms of action and a responsibility that one can ascribe to the EU's role in terms of addressing these problems the thing from a forest law perspective forest conversion classically isn't regulated so regulations exist for the governance of selective logging or for protected areas or for particular use of forest forest conversion is a relatively new phenomenon not particularly anymore but relatively new phenomenon and what has been lacking has been an update to the legal reform to the forest forest laws to create a framework that sets out well how does it happen who can convert forests on what terms in which way so in none of the countries where we work could you get a proper forest conversion permit and yet forests are being converted instead other permits are being substituted are being used in the place and are being it is to work around the system because the system doesn't work for how the land is being used in some ways you can say it's appropriate it is a practical way of doing things it is to not stop the way that people want to use the land in another sense it means it is unregulated and the rights and responsibilities that go with the way that the forests are being converted are very unclear and it leads to a strong question of what is legal and how do you define it and what happens in the grey zone from the EU perspective we have all sort of voluntary non-bidening commitments that say we will stop deforestation associated with commodity supply chains some of them are by 2020 and given that it's nearly 2019 this is obviously relatively ambitious one of the criticisms and it is a fair criticism that comes with these easy things to say and these are very difficult things to do and the companies and the groups that have made these commitments without exception I cannot think of a single one that I can think of that will actually achieve these sorts of commitments The New York Declaration on Forests which wishes to have deforestation by 2020 and end it by 2030 I go down to the IPCC special report which says that this decline have to happen well before 2030 these numbers don't make sense the urgency that the deforestation is being addressed with versus what the climate modelling says obviously they don't work together but all of this is also happening in the context where let me take the example of Ivory Coast in Ivory Coast you have a country which has pledged to increase its forest cover by 30% to increase its economic development from natural resources including forest cover by 30% and to increase the amount of carbon which is captured by land use by 20 to 30% I can't remember the number but something like this and if you map out from these numbers you just take a look at the land use policies which do or don't exist in this particular country it doesn't add up there isn't a system How is deforestation measured? It's a beautiful question there's no good answer The international treaties don't deal with it sufficiently so the way that are you thinking of the climate sort of treaties or are you thinking So the EU agreement with these countries is about the trade of timber the EU trade agreement with these countries do not go as far as saying you must stop deforestation the sorts of things that you have with the Amsterdam declaration for example or the New York declaration are voluntary entered into commitments by particular countries or indeed the EU which say we will walk towards finding solutions that will slow or halt deforestation by these points The EU is I suppose treading to be generous to the EU it is trying to find a balance between what it can legitimately ask of other countries so how can the EU ask another country to stop deforestation when deforestation is a fundamental aspect to many countries of economic development so what is the balance between these two things So the EU has not at any point said to for example every coast please stop deforestation Please There is a really good example at the moment with the different country different parts of the world but Indonesia so at the moment the EU is negotiating a trade agreement with Indonesia and you have all of the different chapters palm oil is incredibly important to the economy of Indonesia so each party has its own respective interests and a desire to ease trade the language on the and it's in the it's also interesting where it sits in these agreements so this is in the trade and sustainable development chapter of the trade agreement with the EU and what that says is pretty much the EU and Indonesia commit to doing things which are good for sustainable forestry it would be extraordinarily contentious the Indonesian parties representatives would walk away from the table if the EU tried to say in doing this you have to stop deforestation and I was going to come on to it at the end but let me say one thing and then the EU's got its own problems so the EU is deforestation as it wishes in many places without making these equations add up for itself so there is also it would be harder still to make that argument to Indonesia given the way that we promote and have a strong and vocal a vocal at least forestry sector in the EU people aren't doing that because it's very hard in the UK we said we don't want the parallel of trying to define the forest and one of the reasons we need to sing around trying to define what forest is I really promise the EU is not trying to do that I can assure everyone can you imagine and then I'd have to shoot myself sorry and what if it isn't state land or what if take Garner it's a lovely example the state can own the let me get this the wrong way around the state can own the land and the communities can own the forest the trees on the land so this is not a I'm not making that up or if I am it's an example which is almost right this is and what happens if the regulations if the regulations recognise customary rights there's no problem if the regulations don't recognise customary rights there's no problem because you live in Australia due course that the regulations don't count or they can consume those and that's that's definitely one approach that's exactly the problem because especially with mining areas where the state allocates the licenses it de facto becomes the jurisdiction goes out of the sovereign powers of the state because it's trading agreements and investment agreements got involved with the license itself and if there's some attempt from the central government of expropriation it will be sued out of the country so that de facto makes the state much less powerful in the sense of it does I think when that happens I completely agree it challenges roles but if you step back a bit and take benefit sharing agreements because they matter because they matter to what is the fundamental process if you allocate an area of land to someone to use and they don't follow through and they don't do the benefit sharing agreements possibly where does that concession stand now you could argue the company has been allowed to continue to use it and therefore has a legitimate use to expect to be able to continue to use it because it hasn't been challenged by the government or effectively by the community for its non-compliance with the benefit sharing framework you could argue that the benefit sharing agreement framework was sufficiently unclear that it's not fair to ask the company to do anything you could equally argue that the company's right to use that land is fundamentally undermined by its failure to comply properly with the benefit sharing framework there's a legitimacy to all of those arguments and it's in that legitimacy and the relative strength and voice of the different stakeholders of the time that difference comes along but also and I wish I had a different picture of it I have another map which I would love to have right now I what do you do then when you have a forest concession which is granted let's imagine over here but then you also have a mining concession which is allocated overlapping with the same area of land and then you have an agricultural concession which is allocated over the same piece of land this happens this happens frequently so the role of the state is compromise but the role of the community is a compromise and the role of the company is a compromise and do the different ministries realise what they're doing that they just care about the consideration I couldn't possibly comment but I'll leave you to imagine there isn't an effective framework to where can I take as an example, Cameroon it's a really good example ministries do not have enough intent to work together they can grant those permits and they can grant them and to be blunt if they can receive the money that comes from the granting of the permits they're winning there is a very slightly flawed but slightly decent set up for an inter ministerial communication and consultation that should happen when one ministry is granting for example the mining ministry grants land to use in a forest area should it happen, yes what do you do if it doesn't happen how does the person who has benefited or thinks they have that permit and thinks they have the ability to exploit the permit what do they do and what do you do if a ministry grants a permit to use in an area they don't have an authority to grant the permit in can the company rely on the expectation that the ministry surely isn't granting permits where it doesn't have the right or it doesn't become the job of companies to check each one except if it's the general practice which has been going on for the last 20 years would you wouldn't you and of course it comes with investment risk of course it does but at the same time this is practice and this is common and this is going on and this ultimately goes to land use and land use planning which is something which is I brought up forest conversion as the precursor to land use planning which remains underneath a lot of these issues and remains grey in terms of its systemic structure I mean there are lots of examples where benefits sharing agreements have been entered into a quite a low level a level which was felt to be unfair with hindsight by those that negotiated it from the community's perspective you've got some examples in the Republic of Congo where that's led to conflicts where representatives have sought to prevent the use by the companies that had the permit to use it that's actually happening more in the Republic of Congo where I remember that I'm aware of I'm sure there are other examples of it it's still in the minority of cases that it happens but it is there now it's a trend which has happened they can ask and they can ask to have that that's one of the things that needs to be dealt with in the template agreement how do they know and are you dealing with it you could do an inventory of the forest and see how much timber there is and I can understand the value of it so it will make the projection of the value as what they see is there or you can tell them a way to be harvested under the measurement and the calculate what you're going to do on that basis or you can tell them to do the value of the company's profits in which it's got the hardest time getting the information they can try but there's the balance of power so your easiest option is to do the inventory that's what you can try as we enter the board it comes in it's a good approach but good luck having some communities further away areas finding the dependent board and we'll come in and have the I mean you can and it's a good approach it's not always practical but you can in this one I was already interested how you try to represent different parties and stakeholders because then when we were talking about the dilemma of having a community sharing the same space so you try to bring them it's community I mean the work started from a civil society community perspective but why the analysis wasn't these are the stakeholders who are least likely to have as good access to legal capacity skills, legal access to people but of course it doesn't work the whole system works so let me let me go back a bit because I just okay conversion blah blah blah so these points the land allocation these permits none of this works obviously if you're only dealing with it from the community perspective you can't do that so one of the things that we do is where we can is we try and create a space where people will come together we did it with the Gabon example as well with the benefit sharing agreement which is bringing people into the same room and getting them talking about what their expectations are so that you're creating a whole system that works rather than just representing one view it meant that communities didn't get everything that they wanted in the way that the benefit sharing agreement worked but equally it's something that the companies agreed to and agreed to commit to over time if it is a compromise whether or not it's a fair compromise you can surely argue but it's a compromise on the forest conversion it's frankly a much harder problem so bringing people together to get into this issue is more difficult there is a arguably sometimes a stronger consensus between some parts of the private sector and some parts of civil society and there's quite a tussle that goes on between different ministries one of the things that you have is ministries who want to be able to grant rights and permitting and as I was saying get the benefit bringing ministries together and giving them enough of an incentive to come to an agreement this is a much bigger challenge Would you say ministries or the private sector are more operative? Depends on the day depends on the person depends on the context it can be anyone for me one of the biggest lessons in all of this is how much the individual has always mattered sure it's the law and sure it's the system but it's actually the individual this I just wanted this is this goes back to Pierre's point about forests and definitions it's a map of Ivory coast and I'm sorry because the legend has come off the bottom of it which is irritating all of the bits which are coloured are bits of forest what's probably notable there is how much isn't forested land from a country which was very significantly forested not so long ago the dark green is the protected areas so control over how forested you I'm going to try and get this the right way around these are agro forest areas this is a whole new type of forestry which is coming along the ones with the stripes going this way so you can see it's quite a lot of you can also see it's some of the more accessible places in terms of access one of the questions when dealing with land use and who can do what on it is the classification of the forest and then you classify some are protected areas some are unprotected depending on the country the language is different but ultimately you can do certain things and you can't do others agro forests are contentious to say the least because what is an agro forest it can be palm it can be soy it can be plantation trees it can be area which could be classified to be agricultural land later it depends again on the country but it is this is a classification which would be done not that long ago and it is quite an interesting to me indication of just how susceptible the land is to being converted or significantly converted almost draw a line around it and say what can happen inside it so that is the last decision to create a different policy and it just gives a different bottom and the thing which is more challenging in some countries than others is finding the map of how the forest has been allocated and what the concession is and the new policy so you can imagine I mean I offer you a cliché I take you from a German system to a system in the democratic of the Republic of Congo I promise you you will have to do concession all that quite a lot of the news the taxes have been paid on it the point I suppose so what the work that we have done so far is to do looked at the laws which don't in fact exist is what we discovered so in the poor countries I mentioned in Kharun in Gabon in Brazil Asia in Vietnam to see what was the legal framework was there a legal framework that governed the way that forests could be converted the answer across the board was no sometimes there were bits that dealt a little better but generally there was no one system in any of those countries which properly defined it and these are the points that we've picked out and focused on in terms of what it would take to get a system that works land allocation being the most basic and most fundamental probably also the most difficult probably effective permits, permits to do what to be held by what type of company and what context how is timber, the resulting timber commercialised the reason for that there are estimates that about 70 to 80% of the timber which is now traded is coming from forest conversion is it legal can timber be legal if it comes from a process which there isn't a proper permit for if so how protection of the environment because because it isn't a foreseen activity the sorts of laws that are applied to the way that forest laws are being converted simply don't work so a system which you would use for sustainable sustainable forestry can't possibly work for forest conversion because there's no presumption of the land becoming reforested subsequently and recognition of community's rights if communities would get a right from the ongoing use of the timber from land what happens when there is no more timber on it how is a right recognised can it be and all of those are really fundamental and really crucial things which systematically aren't being dealt with yet when you think about things like forest to plantations of different sorts in the context of maybe wanting to get some red objectives and the use of plantations being a useful or a possible mechanism for that you start to begin to see the implications that this has in terms of land use for a lot of currently forested countries that's a little nap illegal logging this is to come back to the EU or at least dominantly to come back to the EU there is an EU law that says illegally harvested timber can't be traded on the EU market it was done as the counterweight in some ways to those voluntary partnership agreements so if you imagine a country enters into a trade agreement with the EU and says we are going to commit and we will work with the EU to make sure that there is adequate system to be able to guarantee that timber that's exported is legal and brilliant very understandably and it was Indonesia that first made the argument most vocally why should that timber have to compete with illegally harvested timber from the rest of the world so the EU recognised this is a valid point and there was enough other voices also calling for something along these lines and brought into force a piece of legislation to do that it came into force in 2013 it's pretty obvious that the EU acting on its own can't stop the trade of a legally harvested timber it's but one market it was done with the aim of being a bit of a blueprint, a bit of a front runner it's complementary to other legislation in the USA and Australia there have been moves to have other legislation which is similar in other parts of the world so some exist in Japan although it can be criticised there are chats of having it in South Korea there are there I even mention it there is a guideline which has been spoken of for very many years in China which no one has yet seen but the sort of thing but the aim behind the EU's action and this was is it possible to both address one's own access to the EU's market itself but also to do something which has an impact beyond arguably the Australian legislation which shares bits of the EU's is a good example that it could have an influence further our work on this has been to really help the implementation, the enforcement but also the understanding of the law in doing it we've worked across the board with the regulators, with civil society and then NGOs international and with the private sector both in the EU but also internationally the purpose in all of this has been to see how to help make the law work as well as possible on the basis that it's underlying intention underlying aim is a good thing environmental EU law is famously at the bottom of the rankings for being implemented and enforced well it goes to questions of political will it goes to questions of resourcing so it has been it is fair to say a bit of an uphill battle to make sure that even all of the member states had the correct national laws to implement this piece of law properly equally, five years after it was brought into force it is true to say it is working better is it working perfect? Of course it's not but it is as opposed to the opportunity that the opportunity of being able to also scrutinise the question of what is illegal logging and to use that question in the EU also with EU quality makers who are working on some of the initiatives more internationally to scrutinise this question effectively of forest governance what makes effective forest governance can it work the types of regulator in the EU and enforcing this law have tended to be the forestry department this creates two really fundamental questions and problems first of all how does the forestry department in the UK understand what the laws are in a country, the other side of the world if we're importing timber from them the mechanism of the timber regulation says that you are brought illegally harvested timber and you as a company also have to pay attention do a risk assessment as to whether it's illegal in the framework of the law the question of what's legal is set out there are five categories of law that are set out and so legal is understood to be the laws that fall into those categories for the country of harvest so it's things like is there a proper permit have community rights being respected have the environmental protections being respected go back to the forest conversion question you see very quickly that there is an overlap which matters a huge amount but one of the real issues that we got to at the beginning was the regulator in the UK didn't have a clue to begin to understand what is the law in Ghana what should I be looking for what should a company be looking for and what should I as a regulator be looking for in terms of understanding how to oversee and to scrutinise it has been a very consistent question of building understanding starting from the bottom up in terms of building the capacity of the regulators and also building the willingness of the regulators and the companies to intervene on this law it is very easy and it is a mistake that the EU often makes which is to look outside its own boundaries to the tropical forested world in particular and claim that illegal logging is the problem there and failure of market functioning is the problem somewhere else this is in one way a very good illustration of the facts that getting laws to work well it's not something that happens easily and that the EU in creating this law arguably did something which was a very strong and positive message but making it work has also to reflect on the weaknesses in EU legislation of actually making it work what is illegal logging so two examples which come from the earlier examples if a benefit sharing agreement hasn't been respected is it legal I can argue no because that's one of the preconditions for the timber to have been commercialised so how could it be otherwise the practical challenge in making this bite in the EU is providing the information the evidence and also helping the regulators understand that this is a relevant question of legality again if timber comes from unregulated forest conversion can it be legal on the one hand there wasn't a law saying you couldn't cut down the tree but if you look at what you end up getting into administrative law questions of did the government have the right to do the thing unless it explicitly didn't depends on the country or you could argue it differently and you could say actually no fundamentally it can't be legal and these are the sorts of things which get feel difficult but are important it is easier to point to whether a timber permit has been used six times for six different the same timber permit has been fraudulently used six times for six different areas that's one thing that works in the minds of regulators in the EU but these sorts of questions are much more complex one of the reasons that they matter I guess is as questions of forests and land and natural resource use continue to have an international dimension to them and unless this governance works better there are a huge number of cracks that come through to finish off I give an example from Liberia where there's a pilot red project which is being developed the red project is meant to come it's a small pilot area it is being done at the local level it's not being done at the national level at the moment so it's really being done as a case study of it but there are questions in what red is reducing emissions from deforestation and deforestation falls under the EU and natural resources sort of projects to encourage companies not to chop down trees that are most simplistic how do you incentivise those countries or communities or areas or regions not to do it what's the back and forth there's a contract on some sort of agreement one of the issues that is going on is a particular pilot agreement and the context of it Liberia is one of the countries which has had a huge amount of international money pledged to it to make red project work so there's a real interest in multiple sectors making this pilot show that it is possible to do red projects in Liberia at the moment no one knows what a carbon right might be nothing on it no one knows who might own it or what the condition is for owning it or if there's a claim to that they can go to under what terms for how long and whether there's been a database that was made that comes down to be over that these are the real nuts and bolts that actually happened in practice the policy the conversation continued but the practicality of the national legal framework not matching what the policy framework is asking for and needs to work in practice is a real example of again where right and responsibilities aren't clear and the sorts of things that will be a good structure to see the government use the forest agenda and obviously that can do but is there whatever levels do you think this engagement will be to help us because of other issues I think it needs to be grounded in national law and reflection of national rights community management there are various studies that will show you that where communities have a better interest and the rights that are recognized and respected that is helpful for the better and stronger government to help for us going forward we'll also find some studies there's a new one to all of this and it's but there is a I can see in it it yields rights to me that there is an argument where those that have a connection are allowing this to rely and have a right in that role to recognize this and that there are I guess a ridiculous number of interest going forward on one hand I can sound critical on those red projects and I am throwing a lot of money around for that thought at the same time if it is achievable and there is a lot to believe in that drawing a connection to some of this is a dramatic absences in the government's framework sounds very interesting I think actually that's probably my biggest feel in all of this is there is no one approach there is a new subtlety to the way the national laws work which also I am not best placed to speak to and it needs to be an inclusive process which is evolving under the state of this national idea how there is an intro and there needs to be a balance between the economic development but it is very easy to the position of plans that has never been made up by creeps I don't need five minutes but that's it so it depends on the member state the beauty of you all being it's an art for each member state to do it themselves I could talk about for our member to control myself so the member state is different depending on the member state one of the things that the member state have chosen to do is to collect together and look at where their trades so they look at their trade data customs data to work out where they are getting timber from do what is probably a fairly arbitrary assessment of which countries look more risky combine that with an assessment of what the projects are which are coming from different countries particular studies of that product from that country so they go deep on particular issues and they pull their data according to the countries which have similar supply chains that make it relevant and on the back of that that's not one of the things that has been used a little bit with DNA and isotope testing so there is DNA and isotope testing that you can do to connect to analyse whether timber is of the species that is claimed and also whether it comes from the area and the country or the subway that it is claimed if that doesn't match there is a strong argument today that the company could possibly understand properly the risk of illegality because it is misunderstood whether timber came from so DNA testing has been used a little bit but a lot of the time it is much more a question of they are able to fold to companies more easily more than that to see if it has the company ask the right questions at the right point and at this stage the answer is still quite often there Can you talk a little bit more about the three agreements that are existing as well as being negotiated and compare it in terms of how are they shaping the governments of countries such as Ghana in a sense that they are like EPA or an economic partnership agreement or free trade agreements compared to that and how are they shaping and weakening the governments structure of the country Do you mean the ones which answer the timber specific ones? Not really a timber but the environment So the trade agreements or the investment agreements that I'm aware of with the countries that we know best are not environment led let's be very clear the trade or investment led so they will have they all have provisions to some extent on governments or sustainable use of natural resources or transparency in certain regions or a clear allocation of rights something and they'll have something on those levels the issues is to follow up so to the extent that it's TSD which I spoke about the trade and sustainable sustainable development section of the Indonesia trade agreement is I think quite typical in this respect which is that it doesn't have enforcement provisions so you have a lot of the rest of the trade agreement which does and then you have this section that doesn't I suppose in terms of what that does for governments to me politically it weakens the focus so it is there is a push and a pull on all of this which is going on with the EU or I suppose other countries also speaking with multiple voices depending on the issue but at the end Thank you very much Emily thank you so much I should have introduced that this is the first in the law environment I'm going to send the lectures for 2018-19 academic year we've been running these out for nearly 10 years I'll let him say it's first I'm sorry You should not Thank you very much for coming we do circulate information about the next one and the whole series that's going to be very soon we're honestly just getting quite enough so next week we've got that and we're pitching up we're pitching up a popular subject of plastic pollution so if you've been grabbed by the terror of plastic European policy governments ran plastic pollution what have been the responses since they were out in the highlighted issue there have been changes obviously there's been more discussion so that's the animal thing that's happening in this it's a very interesting area obviously I think we have to wish we have to wish everything well and a new job because I think it has set you up excellently for what has been with the government on Brexit there's no one else it's very complicated you're having to do a different ministry no working for the government just to go right that way that's all right anyway, thank you for coming we'll do it again what else I made my sculpture out of a moment of smile