 Now, for our second keynote speaker, we are fortunate to have Dr. Bob Scholes. Bob is a systems ecologist who works at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research here in South Africa. And he's one of those people who has successfully bridged the science policy gap. He's an expert on Savannah and Woodland ecology, but he's also a convening lead author of the IPCC and chair of the Group on Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network, the so-called GEOVON, along with many other leadership roles. Last Thursday, Bob helped us synthesize the results of a day-long symposium on developing a new research agenda for the dry forests of Africa. And he's promised to import some of the insights from that event into his remarks today. Dr. Scholes. Minister, representatives of the many organizations who are part of this Forest Day, participants and delegates. One of my favorite characters from literature is Dr. Zeus's Lorax, who says, I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. Well, I am the species Lorax Africanus. I am going to speak to you on behalf of African trees today. So the main things that I'm going to tell you today is I'm first going to try and build for you a scientific case for why it is that forests matter as much as they do. And in particular, I'm going to paint for you why African forests and particularly African dry forests are an increasingly important part of that equation. And then I'll talk a little bit about some of the issues that African dry forests and African forests face and what some of the solutions might be for those problems. You know, people speaking in the plenary sessions of Forest Day are not allowed to use PowerPoint presentations and that's a bit of a limitation, but I managed to negotiate that I will be allowed to show you one slide that I'm going to tell you needs that assistance. And the key point is this, is that human activities are putting approximately nine petergrams of carbon per year emitting from the land surface. Now a petergram is a number that most of us just can't get our heads around. When I explain it to my mother, I say a petergram is a kilometer by a kilometer by a kilometer of solid carbon. Just think of a big black box full of solid graphite or diamonds if you like, a kilometer by a kilometer. That's one petergram. We're putting nine of those off the surface of the earth through our activities every year. Now the trick is this, is that only half of that 47% in fact in 2010 appears in the atmosphere. Where does the rest go? Well the rest is taken up by the ecosystems of the world and it so happens that it's taken up almost equally between the oceans and the land. And it's that uptake on the land where forests play an absolutely critical role. So if you did the sums while I was talking that 25%, in other words that half of one half that goes into the land is that 2.4 petergrams per year going into what we refer to as the overall land sink. Now what makes up that land sink? It has two large components. The one is what's disappearing into forests and the other is what's disappearing into non-forests. So I would pause there for a moment just to give us a reminder. We use forests as the poster child for the land sink, the lungs of the world and all that stuff. And that's true but remember that about the same amount is going into less charismatic ecosystems. Into grasslands, into wetlands, into rangelands and into agriculture as well. So we have these two large components. If we further unpack the forest side of this equation, moving on, what we can see is that forests sink. So there's a net uptake from the atmosphere into the land surface in forests, actually composes of a big uptake in intact forests and then a net emission from the forests that are being transformed. And that forest transformation is in fact a consequence of two things going up going on. One is the deforestation flux which is that large number of 2.94 petergrams which is balanced in fact by a regrowth on many of those deforested areas which are subsequently abandoned and regrowth. So it's a complicated picture but the important thing is that we're aiming at that 2.94. And that's a huge number. Remember that all of the efforts which thus far have gone into the Kyoto Protocol really only address 50% of the world's emitters and of those they have managed to achieve about a 5% deviation from the baseline. So in other words all of the efforts of all the other parts of the world add up to about 2.5% of the emissions. That there is nearly a quarter of the emissions. So if we can do something to influence that we can have a greater effect than everything that has happened so far under the Kyoto Protocol and that's why this is so important. The other thing to remember is not only are we going after that number there, that big number there but we really have to make sure that this number here is not compromised. The things that the forests are doing, the intact forests are doing all by themselves we need to ensure that they're able to continue doing. I also need to caution everyone against the oversimplification which we all commit. I'm very fond of that statement by Albert Einstein that everything should be as simple as possible and in this complex realm of red and negotiations that's absolutely true but it then goes on to caution but no simpler and we use carbon as a shorthand for everything to do with climate and of course that's not true. First of all when we're assessing carbon in these kind of situations we need to make sure that we're counting all of the carbon not just the carbon that happens to suit us or the carbon that happens to be easy to measure. In many of for instance the African dry forests most of the carbon is below ground and if we carefully measure all the trunks of the trees and add them up that's only a fraction of the carbon, the real carbon is sitting elsewhere in the system. Secondly we can't just look at the carbon and ignore the other greenhouse gases we have to do full greenhouse gas accounting. A classic example comes in with for instance forested wetlands now forested wetlands are a store of carbon but they're a source of methane unless you count the methane as well as the carbon dioxide you can get the sums horribly wrong. You can be taking up more carbon but actually having a negative effect on the atmosphere so we have to look at all the greenhouse gases depending on the situation that can include nitrous oxide, it can also include the ozone precursors very important here in Africa and the aerosols that are produced from forested landscapes as well. But beyond that there are circumstances where we also have to consider the direct forcing that forested landscapes have on the climate. We know the case of for instance when you put dark forested canopies over a snow covered landscape. We know in fact that doesn't help out the climate at all in fact it is negative in terms of the climate. Now there are situations in fact around the world where the same thing happens with need and involve snow and conifers. So sometimes we have to do corrections for the direct effects that we have on the climate by putting more trees into the landscape. And finally we need to look at full project cycles and the footprints of our actions wherever they occur not just within the narrow area that we're looking at involved in the project but where is that displaced activity going and what is the emissions that result in totality from this action that we are taking. We can take this slide off now, I'm done with that thank you very much. We also need to subtly change the mental models that we have on what deforestation consists of especially when we look at Africa. We are all familiar with the deforestation in tropical areas that has occurred in Southeast Asia and we have images of smoldering tropical peatlands and conversion into oil palm plantations. We also have images from the Amazon of tall rain forests being pushed over by bulldozers to make way for pastures or for log extraction and those phenomena are real and true. But they represent waves of deforestation which are now actually coming into their kind of point of maturity and starting to slow down partly because the resources have been exhausted but partly because new policies have been put in place to address them. The next major wave of deforestation is already happening and it's happening in Africa and it's not happening through those mechanisms. In fact, the initial stages of deforestation everywhere in the world in Southeast Asia and in tropical America did not take place in the tall moist rain forests at all. It takes place in the dry forests which are adjacent to the moist forests not the forest fringe but the very large extensive areas under Dracarp forests in Southeast Asia or under Cerados for instance in South America and those are the areas which get transformed to a much greater extent and much earlier on in the process than the tall moist forests. Now they only have in rough terms about half the carbon per hectare as tall moist forests do but they are twice as extensive and so in fact the big emissions and the big transformations take place initially in that environment and there's good reasons for this. You know, moist tropical rainforests, we all love them from the comfort of our couches watching National Geographic and Discovery Channel but they're actually rather nasty places to live in and very few people do live in them because their access is terrible they're full of biting insects, they're unhealthy and it's really quite hard to grow a crop there. There are certain crops that will survive there but many of the crops that we depend on actually prefer to grow in those dry forest environments around the edges and those areas are the ones that transform because you can get in there, you can build a road, you can clear them you can live there relatively healthily if you take the right precautions the soils are not great but they can be made very productive and so that's in fact where the focus is. Secondly, we need to understand that certainly in the areas in which I have experience, which is east and southern Africa the actual pattern of forest land transformation is not this classical mental image of... Here was a tall intact forest, a long come people and they cut it down and they turn it into a non-forest and you can detect that on space using a satellite and it's very clear it was a forest and now it's not a forest and we can work out the numbers. The typical pattern in the African dry forests and woodlands is first of all you get high grading you get the valuable timbers being extracted and that's a process which has actually been occurring for about a century and the really high value timbers for instance African blackwood is now extremely rare it has been selectively removed over a long period of time. The next thing that happens is you get the charcoal manufacturers coming into those areas and that's been driven by the African pattern of urbanization so large populations living in urban areas who need domestic energy and charcoal is a much more easily transportable form of energy for those populations who often don't have access to other energy sources and so that drives then the removal of a large proportion of the remaining trees and then finally you get agriculturalists coming in low input, low output agriculture which after a few cycles leaves us with an extremely degraded shrubby situation which is of very little value for any of those services. I would argue however that it is both unfeasible and in fact undesirable to prevent land cover change in Africa. Africa's population currently a billion will double over the next 40 years. There will be two billion people and those people have a right to come to a standard of living which is much higher than their present standard of living and it's not for us to say that they may not do this in order that Africa might be some giant national park for the world. We can however leapfrog the pattern that we've seen elsewhere in the world of going into a degraded landscape and then having to spend a huge amount of effort to then restore that into some kind of functional landscape. What we can do because of the situation in Africa largely many of these areas are functionally intact. They are still working as functioning ecosystems which can support a wide range of services. We can transform those landscapes in an intelligent way towards a situation where they can deliver more of everything that we require of them and maintain minimum levels of those critical things that we have to have out of them. Yesterday was one of the releases of the global panel on food security and climate change and amongst its seven recommendations was one which related to what we're referring to as sustainable intensification and that is one of the key things that we need to do. There is no choice for us but to transform some of this landscape into agriculture but we need to do it in such a way that we're getting the most out of those areas that we do transform and sparing other parts of this landscape to deliver the services that they deliver. We need to do this in a climate smart way. What we need to achieve that kind of transformation is several things. Firstly we need to ensure that there is a fair price for the services that those landscapes provide and that means not only ensuring that the amount of money that's committed to this is adequate to the task but also avoid what I refer to as economic leakage. Now in this area of carbon services we're all familiar with the notion of leakage which is that you preserve your carbon here but it leaks out of the landscape somewhere else and people doing their activities here have shifted to over there. Well there's another form of leakage as well and that is that when we put aside $100 billion for a purpose such as red in fact very large fractions of that get creamed off by the machinery that we put in place to make sure that this happens. So it goes to a huge international bureaucracy it goes taken off by a whole bunch of consultants it gets taken off by the people who assess the carbon credits and the brokerage and finally right at the end of the tailpipe the people who are actually doing taking the opportunity cost of not transforming that landscape get a pittance out of it. So we need to make that whole flow much more efficient than it is we need to avoid it being captured by a whole series of elites along the pipeline. Secondly we need to have effective informed and just governance of the system at all levels from the international level through the national level and down to the local level. Without this we will not achieve what we need to achieve and finally we need reliable and cost effective ways of measuring our achievements and ensuring that we are satisfying them. This will require a fusion of very high technology approaches such as satellites, such as airborne LiDARs such as ground based LiDAR scanners but also with much lower technology interventions as well community involvement in measuring the resources that they have themselves. Very straightforward things not rocket science at all but it needs to be integrated with these other techniques so we can have robust and transparent and credible and cost effective systems for achieving this. The guidance on this needs not to be some standard of absolute accuracy that we get within so many percent of the true mean. The guidance of this is in fact a utilitarian concept we need sufficient accuracy we need enough accuracy to know that both the buyers and the sellers are satisfied that at least this amount of the service is being provided. We don't need to apply those extremely demanding technical scientific standards of getting it down to an absolute precise measure we need to be able to have a level of measurement which gives comfort to all the parties. So in summary, forests matter a lot. They matter an enormous amount and what we can do to protect the integrity of that carbon sink and to restore it and to stop the source term to reduce the source term can make a bigger difference to the future of the climate at this juncture of the world's history than anything that we've done up to now. This is a cause worth putting a lot of effort into. Let's not kid ourselves about the technical and institutional challenges that we have to rise to to ensure that it happens in a way that is effective but it is a challenge that's worth putting that effort into. Thank you.