 Good morning, good morning everybody and good afternoon depending on where you are. Thank you all for joining us this morning. This webinar will be one hour long, starting with a welcome from Mr. And then we will dive straight into the flash of the webinar with the presentation of two studies, one carried out by CIDT, and the other by Wecoft. Studies show that forest based communities play a key role in protecting forest resources and improving the resilience of forest dependent people in times of crisis. Before giving the floor to Mr. I would like to remind all participants that you may send questions to our speakers through the Q&A, the question and answer box on the bottom of your screen. I encourage participants when you do so to also share your names and organizations when you send your questions. Now, without further ado, I would like to give the floor and yes, and sorry, and after after the question and answer session. The session will be concluded by Sophie Goulds from the Forest and Farm Facility. Before giving the floor to Mr. Edward Robert Steiner, I would just like to remind you that there is a question and answer box and I will remind you about this when the question and answer session starts. So without further ado, Mr. Edward Robert Steiner, Deputy Director of FAO's Forest Situation, please give us your welcoming remarks. Thank you, Alexia, and good morning and good afternoon to everybody who is on the call now. It's my pleasure really to welcome you to this webinar. It's a webinar series on COVID-19 and the forest sector of which this is part and today is is is a central element of this because the experience from forest communities of COVID-19 impacts but also how forest communities can and need to address the crisis is a critical element of of the COVID-19 response that we are now all working on in many ways, because the forest based communities play such a critical role as custodians of forest resources. And at FAO, we have been working with forest based communities for so many years in so many contexts that we also see not only how hard they are hit from the COVID, but also what critical role they can play in addressing it. It is both the generation of livelihoods and incomes for people in the local communities, but also for all of us who benefit from forests, both its products and its services in many different ways, one or another. And as such, we are quite keen to maintain the community interest and the local farmers and the local communities, the local foresters at the center of our efforts to support the grass to not only overcome COVID-19 but also to move towards a more sustainable production and consumption if you want a more a more equitable world where we hold deforestation where we where we reverse forest degradation and where we go towards sustainable production of forest products in total. And as we go into this pandemic, of course, a lot of the issues that were there in the past, they have been aggravated by the situation now of reduced ability to make a living and and increased issues with health and safety and all of this is coming as a really hard blow to a lot of the work that has been done to build communities, but they remain a huge social asset and capital that we have to build on and want to build on to mitigate and help recover from the impact and also help to build back better after hopefully the second wave that is currently ravaging through some of the region in the world is over. They have at least three key roles and I'm sure you see many more but they are really critical custodians of forest in the way that they that they maintain pressure up and monitoring up to to hold deforestation and forest degradation if they if they happen in an illegal way or in an informal way that shouldn't happen. They are critical sources of livelihoods, acting poverty and hunger in a very real way on a day to day basis or week to week basis. And hence are important to keep up the basic supply of food security of nutrition and many of the things that are needed to help help communities go forward. And the third of course that is also very important is the production and trade of legal and sustainably produced forest products. It's the communities that could bring all of these things together in a good way and hence we'd like to push for both putting community in the forefront on the COVID-19 crisis and towards achieving the SDGs. And I believe with the setup today and I'd like to congratulate everybody who has been involved in setting up this webinar. We have speakers that will talk very clearly from communities themselves in two regions, both Asia and and Africa are and listen and discuss with them recommendations that come up from their light latest insights. It's great interesting stuff that we are going to see today and hear today. So I'm looking forward and wish us all an interesting and inspiring webinar and thank you once again for the organizers and for all of you to take the time to join us and let's let's see what comes from the regions with this back to you. Thank you Alexia. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Ramit Steiner for your opening, opening messages. I would like to give the floor to Miss Daphne Hewitt, FAEU, FLEC program team leader for opening remarks. Thank you very much everyone and thank you for participation I see from the chats we have participants joining us from all over countries from many of the countries where we have actually been working and where some of the some of the countries where the surveys took place. As Edward mentioned and highlighted communities are such a key stakeholder for FAO and in the FAO EU FLEC program, we have over 10 years of work with communities as key stakeholders in the forest sector for our support. The FAO EU FLEC program implements the EU FLEC action plan at the level of tropical timber producing countries we directly give funds to key stakeholders to work on improving governance improving legality, participation, transparency and improving policies and actions for forest reform. This is providing support directly to stakeholders to enable the country's commitments to legality and sustainability in the forest sector and a number of the countries have voluntary partnership agreements with the EU. So for over 10 years we have been directly funding communities and community and associations that support communities both community enterprises and technical assistance to communities. Early this year when COVID first hit. I think we all heard through international development communities from our partners from our networks. A lot of concern about the immediate impact of the restrictions imposed at country levels concern about increase in illegal practices in Tim and tropical forests. And potentially, long term impacts that might cause in degradation and illegality, and also concern regarding the impact on the most vulnerable groups, which are the indigenous people and communities that depend on the forest resources for their livelihoods, and also we depend on to maintain the forests going forward. So in the wake of the immediate onslaught of the of COVID, two of our program partners, CIDT and RECOFT who join us today, came forward with proposals to use their networks at the forest level to reach out to communities and immediately gauge the impact. Some of them are perceptions, some of them are impacts from the first wave of assessments that further work will be done. But it was through these two partners that we've been able to get from some direct feedback from the forest front and using this to make concrete recommendations going forward to help us incorporate community needs and to use their role, community role as custodians of forests and forest resources to greater effect going forward. So this webinar is an opportunity to hear the initial findings from both of our partners, hear what they plan to do next in this area, and to direct all of us to further the resources that will be coming out from the surveys, and also for some concrete suggestions on how to act on these recommendations going forward. And that's where we really welcome your input in the Q&A session to really use this as an opportunity to ask us here in the panel and our partners what is recommended in terms of concrete action by all of us in our respective roles as development professionals, technical assistance providers, donors, and international agencies. Without further ado, I just want to add a slight difference. You will hear from Africa, from CIDT, from the Congo Basin. Many of the communities, the forest communities surveyed have a monitoring role and do not necessarily directly manage community forests attributed to them and have a very strong role in monitoring of concessions and government commitments. And in Asia from RECOFT, there is a mixture of communities with direct forest management responsibility and those that not, but they all depend on forests for livelihoods. And I think that's one of the key elements that we will be looking at in recommendations is how to strengthen community structures going forward. So thank you for participating. And with that, I hand back to Alexia to move us to the finding session. Thank you. Thank you, Daphne, for that. And especially for your focus on different definitions that we have of forest communities, forest dependent communities, but the importance anyway of these entities in responding to impacts of COVID-19. I will now give the floor to our first presenter, Aurélien Dibaine, who is associate professor of international development at the University of Wolverhampton's Center for International Development and Training, CIDT. Dr. Dibaine is the team leader of climate, forest, agriculture and wildlife practice, as well as the project manager for the EU, FCDO funded Congo Basin independent forest monitoring project. Dr. Aurélien, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Alexia, for the introduction and for the FAO for engaging us in this work. And, you know, we present a rapid appraisal of the impacts of COVID on indigenous peoples, women and forest illegality in the Congo Basin. So, as Daphne mentioned, this work was framed within our capacity building project in the Congo Basin for supporting civil society organizations to build the capacity for independent forest monitoring. And we are fortunate to have received the support of the EU and the FCDO in this area. The Center for International Development and Training, you know, we believe that really for sustainable inclusive development, there's need to support individuals and stakeholders to achieve their full potential next phase. As we look at the impacts of COVID, you know, I also just want to take to ask you to to spare moments for, you know, families that have, you know, been brutally impacted in Cameroon by, you know, massacre that happened last Friday just for, you know, kids being killed just for the sake of going to school. So I like that you spend moments as we think about the impacts of COVID on indigenous communities to also think about these communities that are facing a different type of trouble. So we'll look at the study objectives, the methodology, the results and key messages that we derive from the study next phase. So really we wanted, because we're working with frontline communities to assess the impacts of COVID, particularly on women and indigenous peoples and local communities, but also look at the levels of forest illegality, but also the impacts on wildlife trafficking. And at the end, to propose recommendations or action points on ways in which we could support these communities, you know, to build back better and to support the resilience post COVID next phase. So really, we're very fortunate really that we have, in all of you, you know, the biggest data set at the moment, because we're actually able, you know, to speak to frontline communities in terms of their experiences of COVID. Because so far, a lot of the evidence that we've had from the impacts of COVID, a lot of it has been anecdotal, or you know, using secondary modeling. And so we're really dealing here with impacts that are being faced by frontline communities in the Congo Basin. To do so, we first of all with support of the partners provided a support to communities, provided training on sub-making PPE to these communities. This helped to build confidence, and then we then went back to those communities where our national partners and the social distance way to gather evidence of the impacts of COVID on these communities. You will see that we were able to collect close to 7,000 questionnaires. These were then data cleaned and then analyzed using NVivo 11 and Excel. Next slide please. Next. So just to give you an indication of those who took part in our survey, we wanted to highlight this point to further support the view that really these were communities at the forefront, forest dependent communities. You'll find that most of our respondents were farmers, you know, involved in private employees, you know, involved in trading in the communities. And so, you know, they were really directly impacted by the pandemic. Next slide please. The first thing we wanted to find out was looking at the levels of forest control, looking at the presence of the forest administration. And I think you'll find from the evidence that in all countries, so DRC, Cameroon and Congo where these results were carried out, there was significant, you know, absence of government forest control services on the ground. And the communities, you know, reported this by the fact that if you look at the checkpoints, they were absent, they were closed. You know, they couldn't see any forest officials on the ground, carrying out controls. So really it created the environment that allowed for illegality to assist. Next slide please. So as I've just mentioned, you'll see that in DRC, in Cameroon, and in Republic of Congo, that the respondents reported significant increases in the levels of illegal logging during the period of the pandemic. And a lot of these, in terms of the qualitative data that we received was communities seeing individuals from the cities coming in with chainsaws, going into forest, cutting timber and leaving the forest. So there was that overall perception and you see this is a consistent in all countries that communities saw this perception that illegal logging had actually increased in all the areas. And we said this could be linked also to the absence of government presence and control function on the ground. Next slide please. Knowing that COVID, you know, is a genetic disease, we also wanted to find out the terms of the perceptions, particularly with regards to illegal wildlife trafficking during this period. And interestingly, we'll find that in all three countries, the responses were that they thought that illegal wildlife trafficking had declined during the pandemic. And a lot of the responses as to why was the fact that people, there was a lot of fear, knowing that, you know, COVID was resulting from, you know, wildlife, you know, human interaction. So there was this fear that, you know, maybe getting into this area might further perpetuate the expansion of the pandemic. And so we see here communities reporting this perception of a lower levels of illegal wildlife trafficking during period. Next slide please. Now, in concrete terms, what does this mean for communities? So we did ask them, you know, how has this pandemic impacted yourselves? And you'll see that overall, that the respondents in DRC 86% in Cameroon, 57% and in Congo. This was the earliest study survey that was carried out in Congo. And you find that a 0.97% of the respondents indicated that they have been impacted negatively by the pandemic. Next slide please. Now, the question here is, you know, if any of us, you know, taking part in this, if we're to, you know, how will you survive with 25% of your income per month, over six, period of six months. And so we try to find out from the communities, you know, what's the impact on incomes. And you find that in DRC 87% of the respondents were talking about close to 4,600 respondents in DRC. 87% reported in decline in the incomes with women reporting is more decline in the incomes compared to men. And when we break that down, by the level of decline in income, you actually find that the same tendency was found with 42% of women reporting over 50% decline in their incomes. And 26 to 50% reporting, you know, 26 to 50% decline. So that's for women close to 80% decline in their incomes. Now we ask the question as well for all the respondents, what were the impacts on indigenous peoples and local communities there. And you find the significant decline in economic activity. One thing to want to flag out which will not typically pick up from these types of studies is the impact on domestic violence against women and against indigenous communities during this period. So in addition to a decline in economic activity, we also found this impact on women. And this is something really to be aware of. Next slide please. Now, specifically looking at women, I've already reported the issue of decline in the rise in domestic violence, but of course you also found a decline in their activities trade. Many of these women, you know, taking part in the marketing of non-timber forest products, there was a decline reduced in clientele and that of course translated to the inability to take care of their households. Next slide please. So we then asked them, you know, what to do then. And I will see that there was a lot of strong focus looking at DRC on the role of the government. You know, in terms of strengthening local forest control, increasing sanctions on illegality, but a lot of it was about we need support, support to communities. Next slide please. A lot of support was being requested. Financial support. We need financial support. We need opportunities for job creation, support to community enterprise to allow these communities to build back. Economic strengthening around price support, but also around agricultural, how do we access production and input and to access markets. And we also saw an issue here on, you know, supporting forestry activities. How do we make forestry more legal and sustainable, but also building social cohesion measures because clearly with the pandemic, the community meetings, community activities were actually reduced during the period. But of course, mental health support, and those need to continue to sensitize communities. Of course, it clearly shows that people are waiting for vaccination and vaccination. Then it is possible that this can go a long way also to support the recovery. Next slide please. So in terms of recommendations, moving towards the end, there's clearly a need to strengthen civil society engagement in monitoring what is happening at the forest level, particularly with the use of digital technologies. Because of course, even civil society organizations were constrained from accessing forest and also carrying out the monitoring function. There's need really to support engagement of independent indigenous communities and women to take part in the post recovery activities. It shouldn't be that these decisions on how to build back better are taken in capital cities without the engagement of women and indigenous communities. They should be facilitated to take a seat at the table, strengthen their capital cities so that they are able to strengthen their resilience and community forestry we think also provides a strong lever and entry point in this area. There's also the fact that how do we build back better. It's also about supporting nature of the solutions, solutions that will impact on climate but also improve biodiversity. And I've also mentioned really the need to focus on the social psychosocial aspect of the support to communities. And finally, communities being at the forefront, they are the best in terms of their ability to denounce illegality. And this was demonstrated with our partners with an increase in the number of alerts and that were received by the by our NGO partners that are carrying out independent forest monitoring in the Congo Basin. And so, systems that support monitoring will go a long way to to improve others. Legality. Next slide please. And the final one. So lastly, we can only build back better really if we maintain the focus on legality and sustainability that we're not derailed by the pandemic. And that commitments that have been made by governments to fight illegality to stop illegal deforestation that are maintained, but also climate change commitments that have been made by governments. And finally, we need to strengthen as well government law enforcement capacity and support the domestic timber market to legalize to engage in legal trade in timber. And this we think is a way to help to curb the rise in illegal logging that we're identifying. So I thank you very much for listening and over to you, Alexia. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Dr. Bain for your for sharing your experience and your recommendations. I will now give the floor to Dr. David Gantz from Rikof to see to talk to us about his findings of the studies in Asia. Okay, thank you for the opportunity to be here. Just clarification our name is Rikof. You don't you can drop the sea it's a silent sea. But I know a lot of people still call us Rikof TC or Rikof C. I'm about to present as a collective effort from many people at my institution, the one I'm leading, as well as members of FAO EU FLECTE program in particular those here in the wrap office. And I want to acknowledge them before I begin. Next slide please. A little bit about Rikof and the importance of this research for us. We believe in a future where people live equitably and sustainably in and beside healthy resilient for us. And that's why we're looking at this this kind of resiliency. We want to take a long term landscape based approach and inclusive approach to help local communities secure their land and resource rights, build alternative livelihoods achieve gender equality and combat climate change. In this way we see the opportunity to build resilience to crises like COVID-19 through the entry point of community forestry. Next slide please. As Daphne already mentioned, it's very important to understand the term about community forestry is. This is a broad term for approaches that empower people to manage and protect and benefit from local forest these approaches have different names in different parts of the world. In Asia, they call it social forestry in Laos, they call it village forestry. Many people use participatory forestry community based forest management and people centered forestry. So the names really differ but the they vary in the extent to which they give communities the rights to use and benefit from those forest resources. For example, some allow communities only the right to use forest resources for subsistence or home use, whereas others allow communities to set up for us enterprises and sell commercial forest products. Forests are formally structured and organized and most have formal community forestry user groups that are governed by an elected management committee. That committee oversees the development and implementation of regulations on forest use and forest management plans and activities. And these committees also manage funds and bank accounts is an important asset to to consider here. Community is widespread in Asia where it has raised the living standards of forest communities while protecting and expanding the forest area. Research shows that community forestry is a solution for achieving many of the sustainable development goals, as well as the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. However, we have limited research right now on how community forestry and related tenure schemes help people cope with COVID-19 and recover from similar disasters and crises. So this is the gap that we're really trying to address here. Next slide please. A little bit about the research. The aim of the research that FAO and Recoff undertook is we really wanted to know whether or not community forestry contributed to the resilience of communities that depend on the forest during the pandemic's onset and how this possible contribution could be strengthened the contribution to their resilience. Who was surveyed? We surveyed 435 people in seven Recoff Focal countries. Those countries are Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, PDR, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. That's about 60 people per country. Half were from the national majority group and half were from minority groups and about a third were women who responded to this survey. All surveys were done on the phone and in the local languages. This was not an online survey because we found that for frontline forest user groups we needed to actually pick up the phone and call them. We had about 47 questions in our survey. Next slide please. The context for the research. Like I said, this is really about asking these critical three questions. And the study took place early in the pandemic between June and July 2020. And it focused on the immediate impacts and restrictions on ordinary life and economic activity. At this time most respondents were still able to cope using their own savings and also by reducing their expenditures reducing their costs of living. Next slide please. Now I'd like to move into some of the findings. There are eight key findings. I hear the first three. Finding one, the study confirmed that forests provide a wide variety of uses and products to local people across all seven countries. And while people collected forest products for mostly home use and sale, most said that they were selling agricultural products as their main source of income. The next finding finding to the ability to sell forest products provides community forest members with income that can be saved and used in a time of crisis. More than a third of the community forest members sold timber or non timber forest products as a main source of income and nearly half of those said that using the savings from those sales was a moderately or very important coping mechanism. We found that a fifth of the community forest members used income generated from community forestry as an important coping mechanism during the lockdown. Based on these findings, we estimate that 3 million community forest members across the lower Mekong countries, the five lower Mekong countries, dependent significantly on their savings generated by selling community forest products to cope during the lockdown. Finding three negative impacts of the lockdown on livelihoods and food security were widespread across all the groups that we surveyed, and 80% of those interviewed said they suffered such effects from the lockdown and 49% of them reported not being able to sell their forest products because there were no buyers or the prices were so depressed that trading them really didn't make sense they were not profitable. So they didn't sell those products next slide please. Finding four COVID-19 and the lockdown affected women and men differently. We already heard this from from Dr. Aurelian in the Congo Basin in Thailand and Indonesia women were more likely than men to say that they had experienced negative impacts of the lockdown on their livelihoods and on food security. And across all the countries, many more women than men reported having greater workloads because of homeschooling and family health care responsibilities. Respondents reported increased incidents of domestic violence in particular in Vietnam were 13% said this is also a similar finding to the African region. Finding number five, although travel restrictions prevented people from accessing markets and selling their forest products, they did not prevent most people from accessing or harvesting from their own forest, except in Vietnam. Overall, most forest users did not report having changed their use of forest during the lockdown. However, the situation was a bit different in Myanmar and in Vietnam where respondents did say the lockdown changed their forest use. Finding six in all countries except Vietnam, interviewees reported that community forest committees helped to protect their forest from illegal harvesting. Poaching encroachment during the lockdown and in most countries this was the second most commonly cited form of support after the provision of information about COVID-19 and its spread. And in Cambodia and Myanmar one in five respondents reported an increase in illegal activities as one of their major concerns. Finding seven half of the community forest members interviewed said that their committees had provided support to its members very important finding here. The number across all seven countries, only 42% of the community forest said that they had received support from governments or civil society organizations, organizations like Rikov, this suggests that community forest committees could play an important role in a future crisis, but we need to do a better job of, they would need to do a better job of being organized and supported, as well as have strong links or good links with local authorities. The last finding is that forests did help people cope, but what forest users really need is additional economic support, very similar to one of Aurelian's findings. Small credit schemes linked to community forest committees could address many of these needs and these interviewees identified them, we asked them what they needed to help them recover from the impacts of the pandemic. And 76% of all community forest users expressed a great need for either a cash loan, cash grant or debt cancellation and given that most community forest committees have access to bank accounts. These findings suggest that community forest committees could fill this gap by managing either local micro credit schemes or revolving loans, but right now many of them lack the funds or the capacity to do so. Next slide. Seven things we must do now are preliminary findings point to these seven actions that we should take to support forest communities in their efforts to recover and build back better next slide. Sorry. You're right. The first action increased the ability of community forest members to access credit or emergency grants as I just mentioned, we should create and strengthen community forest funds as credit mechanisms. For example, we should establish and support village savings and loan associations or revolving funds. These kinds of mechanisms will help poor communities cope with personal emergencies in these times of need. This could play a larger role in helping communities prepare and cope with disasters as we've seen with COVID-19 but certainly will prepare them for a second wave or whatever disasters may come their way. The second one is build the capacity of community forest committees to support members in these crisis situations government donors and civil society organizations should provide resources and information during emergencies and training in disaster preparedness and response, but we certainly can do a lot more. Number three, community forest committee should consider potential crises in their planning. This is also really important point to improve their ability to mobilize support, increase the flexibility and the use of their resources and organize finances to provide grants or loans, or these kind of emergency funds as needed. In addition, they should also build capacity to disperse funds efficiently and fairly amongst the community forest members. Fourth, fourthly, all sectors should emphasize gender equality in their investments. We recommend that awareness and since sensitization training be greatly expanded and this is just a starting point of what needs to happen. Fifth, we need to strengthen the capacity of community forest groups to tackle forest crimes and by strengthening social cohesion and investing in these community institutions and providing legal tenure to local people. Community forestry can be a key approach to preventing illegal activities across the region and across the world. Six, we can improve digital access to warn people of disasters and crises inform them how to respond. This will also increase their access to market information and insights that can help them identify market opportunities for their products, grow their forest enterprises and certainly become more profitable and streamline their market chains. Number seven, focus donor support and technical assistance on forestry training and job opportunities with emphasis on fields like forest land, forest landscape restoration, forest management, this can improve forest carbon storage productivity, certainly mitigate climate change but also increase the benefits forest communities receive from their lands. Next slide please. What's next? In our second phase we will survey communities with community forest in seven countries that demonstrated in this first phase strong coping strategies and high levels of resilience to the negative impacts of COVID-19, as well as those communities that did not. We will be taking kind of a case study approach to be conducted from January to March of next year 2021. Next slide please. This research will identify factors that build or weaken the ability of community forestry as a strategy to build the resilience of forest communities to disasters and crises like COVID-19. But we also want this research to recommend policies and interventions that can strengthen community forestry as a social and economic safety net. Next slide please. And thank you very much. In closing I would like to say that community forestry really empowers people to manage, protect, and benefit from local forests. And this study has confirmed that this mechanism should be promoted and strengthened. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much Dr. Gantz for sharing the findings of your study and for identifying key actions going forward. We now have about 15 minutes for the question and answer session. I would like to remind participants to use the question and answer box at the bottom of your screen to write your questions. And we encourage you to provide your name and organization when you write your question. We have about 15 minutes for this question and answer session. And so unfortunately we will not be able to answer all questions today. However, we will be recording any all the questions that you write in the question and answer box and any unanswered questions will be addressed in the next couple of days. And we'll be sent to all participants alongside this events recording. Our first question is, okay. Yes, Supra Patnik is asking how have forest communities coped with the double exposure, such as COVID-19 and the climate crisis. Who would like to take that question, Dr. Gantz? I think that in many forest communities, they view these two crises as one. They ultimately have been dealing with climate change much longer than most of us in terms of immediate impacts from whether it be a typhoon like we're seeing hitting central Vietnam or changes in precipitation with droughts and floods. This region in particular seems to have even more dramatic shifts in either too much water or not enough water over the last four or five years. And now as a result, we're also seeing tremendous wildfires in places that typically do not burn in northern or not burn as dramatically. So for the frontline communities that are addressing COVID-19 impacts, I think they've already been addressing climate change impacts on them. The exacerbation of these two right now, a lot of the strategies I would say are very much the same. When you talk about economic support or these microfinance support, the gender equality issues, as Dr. Rillian said, are just exacerbated by these two crises and they're, you know, they're expounding on themselves to make things even worse. But our interventions and our strategies certainly can be addressing both at the same time. Thank you for your reply. Dr. DuBain, would you like to add something to Dr. Gans's reply? I think that was quite a comprehensive response. But I think that from our study, I think we've seen a lot of community cohesion in terms of communities using the community safety nets and networks to support each other during this pandemic. Particularly in the face of low levels of savings or assets that have basically been destroyed during the pandemic. So I think that the pandemic has just gone to increase the pains that communities already face. And I think it provides an argument for the type of solutions in terms of supporting these communities to build resilience. And I think that supporting community groups, enabling women and women leaders to take positions, see that a table to represent their communities in terms of pushing their own agenda in terms of how and the best ways in which they can be supported to achieve their goals. And I think that part of it as well really in terms of going forward, building on these community networks is the ability really to support community entrepreneurship and business incubation in these communities that allows women and their communities to build resilient systems that allow them not only to deal with the pandemic but also deal with the climate emergencies that they have to deal with. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have now a question from from from from European Forest Institute. How has COVID-19 affected the domestic timber markets in the Congo basin, and in the seven countries that in which we have conducted the survey. How would the panelist suggest that we can build back the domestic timber markets in a better way. And what sort of policy supports would be needed in addition to the economic financial supports that you both have mentioned in your presentations. Dr. Ganz, would you like to reply first and then I will give the floor to Dr. Zibane. Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, from my perspective, the aspect of community forests and supply there, there are many areas in Southeast Asia and South Asia where communities are not allowed to harvest trees, they're allowed to produce non-timber forest products but not actually have any timber proceeds. So the first thing I would say in terms of domestic timber supply would be to allow communities who do have some level of tenure resource rights to harvest trees and to benefit from a domestic market. That first and foremost would be my starting point. Secondly, in terms of improving the market chains, because I think in Southeast Asia, South Asia, there's tremendous domestic buying power. And that buying power, if people are educated enough about certification schemes or about what Fleck T or Red Plus is trying to do, ultimately those consumers could be making much, much better decisions about where their furniture comes from, where their paneling comes from, where their flooring comes from. And that ultimately is a public awareness campaign that needs to happen. It has started, I would say, in places like Thailand, the awareness is certainly around organic produce or what will put into their body has started, but it hasn't really shifted into wood products yet. Now, ultimately, it has to move in that direction. Thank you. Thank you. I'm being told from the sort of technology and the communication officer that unfortunately we actually do have to end the session at 11 on the dot. So, Dr. Debane, if you would like to answer that question in writing and then we will be able to send to all participants because unfortunately we only have a few minutes left. And we need to go on to closing closing remarks again. Just a second, because I think that's really the specificity of the Congo Basin of the 30 seconds. Clearly from our study, there was clearly a rise in artisanal logging that was reported in our study. And I think that the domestic market really, if you're looking at the Cameroon, for example, there was another study that was done by Sahil that we actually found during the pandemic, if it went to the timber packs that there was actually a decline in the availability of timber. But I think that public procurement processes are also opportunities that could allow local communities to access the timber market. And I think there's work going on in Cameroon as well with the association called the FECA-Pobwa, you know, trying to explore ways in terms of, you know, fascinating access of community forest to the domestic timber market, but also a timber traceability systems that allow communities to track the legality of timber that is entering into the market. So I think those are some of the key, you know, approaches as well that could also support the legality and improve the domestic timber market or push the domestic timber market to become legal, particularly with regards to public procurement. You know, in addition to some of the ideas that Dr. Gans has highlighted. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for those additional remarks. Next time we will have a longer session. And so in order to allow participants to interact more with the panelists. Our time for questions is up, but as I said, you will have the opportunity to write in your questions and to have them answered in the next couple of days. I would like to give the floor to Miss Sophie Grohls from the Forest and Farm Facility for closing remarks. Thank you Sophie. Thank you. Thank you, Alexia. I hope I can make it in the time that you have assigned me. So the Forest and Farm Facility is a partnership between FEO, IID, IUCN and IGRECORD and has also engaged in COVID surveys and subsequent responses with the Forest and Farm producer organizations, or how we call it FFBOs. The Forest and Farm Facility is mandated to support directly FFBOs in forest landscapes, which also comprises forest community producers and indigenous peoples. We see FFBOs exist locally around the world as member-based associations, which are platforms managed by women, men, including young people and depending on forest and farms for their livelihoods. We see FFBOs as them critical actors on the ground during times of crisis to maintain their efficient use of resources, farmers and forest users are very much aware of the changes in their landscapes, predicting and addressing risk in the first line. Our findings also based on surveys and updates from our partner FFBOs are very much in line with the findings of RECOF-C and CIDT. The Forest and Farm producers reported serious impacts which have differentiated according to levels of wealth, gender, indigenous peoples or smallholder family farmers. They have suffered from decreased incomes, increased debts, increased food insecurity, more illegality, displacement, loss of properties and even loss of lives. This has been particularly affected by this crisis to increase household workload and gender-based violence while their income decreased significantly. Despite all these challenges, these rural and forest-based communities are not sitting idle because they are on the front lines of the impact of COVID-19, but also other challenges such as those related to climate change. So in short, we could hear already that FFBOs and rural communities play vital roles in immediate emergency responses to COVID-19. Some examples that we heard is FFBOs and their enterprises, they play a vital role in local economies as employers, suppliers and suppliers, so they keep the local economy running. They also had an important role in the flow of information that can reach to the local level and they can also support with translating and transmitting information in local languages. And they also have often, they have been providing social protection services in terms of health, education and childcare, they have done that, but now even more during the response in COVID. We have seen examples, for instance in Nepal where FECOFUN, the Federation of Community Users in Nepal, has organized quarantine premises and food distribution to the most rural world. So these are examples of response, but further FFBOs are also key partners to help build back better to secure more resilient production systems and are just key partners for the green recovery. We have also, I don't know, the conclusion that we had after this webinar that we held on multi-dimensional resilience of producer organizations is that FFBOs and forest dependent communities offer grounded solutions for response and resilience in building back better, securing forest landscape production systems and introducing innovative solutions that will be necessary in the post-COVID-19 world. Daphna, you had some more points that you wanted to add. My final comments are thanking Dr. Ganz and Dr. Jens-Jen really for your presentation and we will, I think we're offline now, but we will be following up to respond to the questions on policy, finance, gender and general conclusions from this meeting. We can follow up remotely and respond to questions, but your interventions were excellent and we will also be sending information on where to find more information on the follow-up studies because I think the public information that's coming out of these two studies is going to be of great interest to everybody here today and beyond. Thank you very much. Thank you to all. Thank you. Recording will be sent with also questions that have not been answered. Bye bye everybody. Have a good day.