 Rhaid i chi'n meddwl ar gyfer, yn unig fawr, ac mae'r hyn sy'n meddwl ar gyfer eu amsyniad. Rydw i'n meddwl yma'r fwrdd yma, sy'n meddwl ymgyrch, sy'n meddwl ar gyfer gwahanol, ac mae'r hynny'n llawer i'r fath i'r gwahanol, iawn, ymgyrch, ac i'r mynd. Desu'r mynd yn digwydd, of aligning drug policy with environmental protection. We will be proposing recommendations to ensure that the UN and national drug policies support instead of undermining the collective efforts made by international community and millions of activists risking their lives to protect nature. My name is Clemi James. I am a climate activist and I am the Senior Policy and Campaigns Officer at Health Poverty Action. I am also the coordinator of the Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice Coalition of which members of this panel sit with me. We are delighted today to be joined by the Colombian and the Brazilian delegation. Two countries who are guardians to one of our planet's largest carbon sinks and most precious rainforests, the Amazon. So without further ado, I would like to introduce to you John Alexander Rojas Cabarrera, Governor of Narraino from Colombia. Hello to all. I am the Governor of Narraino, another victim of the conflict in Colombia. The FARC killed my father 25 years ago. Reconciliation and pardon changed my life and the life of my family and since then I have dedicated myself to being a defender of peace. For greater well-being for my daughters, for our sons and for the Nariniensis and all Colombians. I am arriving here to accompany the Vice President of Colombia who was in Mexico with the negotiations of the UN. We continue to support the process, including the total peace that our President Gustavo Petro, the change government, has proposed. I thank the United Nations and the UNODC, the foreign ministry, Vice Minister Laura Hill, the ambassador and all the team of the embassy to permit my participation and thank you to all the institutions and activists to defend the environment. Narino is a department in the southwest of Colombia. 1,600,000 people, 33,000, 33% is part of an ethnic population indigenous and Afro. We have a geostrategic place because the Pacific and the Andes and the Amazon are part of our state. We have UNESCO heritage including the carnival and we have this understanding around grass and mulba mopa. We have this richness, this biodiverse richness, unfortunately there are 56,000 hectares of coca that are cultivated in Colombia. This is 28% of the total coca cultivation in Colombia. This represents $174 million, $271 million in the pasta base and $386 million in hydro chloride cooking. Drug control policies based in Glyffosate and aerial spraying and forced eradication have failed in Narino after a week of aspersions, particularly in our zone. This has contributed to an increased coca cultivation. We have demonstrated that it is not a solution. It is a policy that has failed and that before everything has had negative consequences in the security of people in Narino. In 2022 there have been 67 homicides, 46% of them. There have been 167. 46% have died in the municipal locality of Tumaco. They have assassinated 34 leaders, three community leaders, 32 social leaders, 19 of them indigenous for Afro, three community leaders and one present leader. There are 13 structures that are at the margin of the law and that dispute territory. This conflict has brought us to this issue where the conclusion I can make is that there is a global market that is growing demanding the consumption of drugs. Narino, with our social conditions and our geographic conditions, we understand that we have a business and a commercialization that comes from the coca and the presence of non-state actors and that their state presence has been weak. Therefore, we propose that we need to do a transformation of this illegal economy towards an illegal graduate. We are proposing a development plan, an integrated development plan along in our zone where Tumaco can be a strategic port for Colombia and the world and to connect us with Brazil. The defense of environment and the search for total peace is what we are looking for in this so that our Afro, indigenous and campesino brothers and sisters can live in peace. We want to reduce the illegal logging and illegal cultivation because that's putting us in our environment. For that reason, our petition requests these territories, these diverse territories will be given this support from all nations. Thank you, Clemi. Thank you to the organizers, to CND, to all of you for being here. It is an honor for me to be with you all today. Two weeks ago, I was visiting this mangrove wetland on Costa Rica's Pacific Coast. It's a small but vital part of the estimated 147 million hectares of mangroves that encircle the globe, providing key ecosystem services like carbon capture and storage, coastal protection and fisheries management. This is why the IPCC urges mangrove protection worldwide and it's why these Costa Rican wetlands are recognized under the Ramsar Convention for their biological and ecological economic importance to coastal people's livelihoods, including the ecotour that I was part of. But as I learned on that trip, the future of these mangroves hinges as much on biodiversity conventions as it does on the drug policies that are being brokered here in Vienna this week. Our superb guide Carlos made the connections clear. He told us that over the, could you go back to this? No, the other one. Perfect. Thank you. He told us that over the past six years, ever since the US Coast Guard had increased patrol pressures on the high seas trafficking, smugglers running cocaine in marijuana by boat from Colombia to Northern Central America had been using the wetlands for drug storage and fuel provisioning and they're paying local peoples unheard of sums to ferry gasoline to them. The effects of their activities are inescapable. Channels are being cut through the mangroves. Young men are leaving fishing and ecotourism for easy money facilitating trafficking. Some have gone to jail. Some have been killed. Others are laundering illicit earnings in the fishing and ecotourism businesses in ways that make it much harder for legitimate businesses like Carlos to compete and which put further pressure on an already diminished fish stock. Others are using drug dollars to expand oil palm plantations and cattle pasture into the wetlands. It's illegal, but no one speaks about these environmentally destructive dynamics because no one trusts anyone anymore, not members of fishing cooperatives, not neighbours, not the police. In effect Carlos summarized in this small but vital site what I and my collaborators have spent the past 10 years documenting at larger scales across Central America what others have documented in South America and what others have documented around the world and that is that the global drug regime is orthogonal to building the sorts of environmental and climate resilience that the planet urgently needs. Let me scale out from Carlos' insights to highlight three mechanisms by which this happens. First, and I want to say I base my comments on a pretty, I would argue, a compelling body of evidence, a small part of which is presented here if you'd like to learn more details. But first I want to be very clear that I'm not talking about the impact of drug crop production on the environment. That is for other speakers to discuss. What I'm talking about is how dramatic environmental harms concentrate in spaces of drug transit and are associated with the investment of drug profits in those spaces. And that originates in the fact that counter-narcotic police and military actions relentlessly push traffickers into remote frontier areas, often in indigenous lands and protected areas. But these remote, biodiverse areas are not just logistically convenient. They are also frontiers, so from a business perspective they represent ideally under-capitalized spaces that are superb for absorbing surplus capital from the drug trade through the transformation of forests into oil palm plantations, cattle pastures, aguacate plantations, lo caset. These are great ways to launder dollars and diversify income and asset portfolios for traffickers. So to be clear, drug traffickers for drug traffickers destroying forests and land grabbing is logistically and financially best practice. Second, just as Carlos made clear in Costa Rica as elsewhere, the profitability of drug trafficking means that the trade can seriously distort rural economies. No legitimate activity can compete with the trade that generates billions of dollars annually. In some central American countries, profits from cocaine transshipment in some years have exceeded direct foreign investment and the value of agricultural exports. The tsunami of drug dollars pulls rural land and labor out of food production, increases the price of staple goods, and further subsidizes extractive activities like gold mining, wildlife trafficking, and illegal timber harvests. These environmental crimes are more often than not made possible by capital from the drug trade. Third, the IPCC's recent climate change and land report identifies several policy levers that can protect existing forests and restore degraded forest lands such as capacity building to support resilient biodiverse food production systems and democratic responsive governance systems to manage land at multiple scales. But what happens when existing forests and lands ripe for restoration are coveted or controlled by organized criminals enriched by the drug trade? There is much evidence to show us that the effective management required for their protection is fundamentally undercut by the violent power of organized crime who will always prioritize their business interests over environmental protection. And as we know too well, and as the governor has just told us, traffickers will kill or compromise anyone who might stand in their way. There is just too much money in the drug trade, too much power to control the fate of too much of the world's lands and forests. We have learned from 50 years of counter-narcotic policy that there is virtually no amount of military aid, development aid, or anti-corruption initiatives or governance capacity building that can compete. Anyone on the ground in the world's tropical frontiers knows this and they know why because they understand what makes Narcos so rich and powerful in the first place. People like Carlos know he had an enviably straightforward analysis for the social and environmental problems he was witnessing in his community. Next slide. The real problem he said was that drugs were illegal. Being illegal made their trade risky, which made them expensive, which meant lots of money. He was emphatic that there will always be demand for drugs. He said controlling drugs in the way that alcohol is controlled was a possible path forward. But not just in one place he cautioned. As you can read here, he made a good case for global legal regulation. So to align drug policy with environmental protection, I think we should listen. Thank you. Thank you, Kendra. And now I'd like to introduce Dave Brilly-Taylor from the Global Drug Policy Observatory. Okay, so I'd like to begin, I promise, a very short presentation with a quote from the year 2000 by the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. I'm not going to read the whole quote there, you can do that. But what I'd like to just highlight is the final sentence, which I will read. Although scientists are now able to appreciate the complexity of this web of interacting natural processes, we're still a very long way from understanding how they all fit together. And I think we can argue that this idea of complexity and the processes to improve understanding of how things fit together can be applied not only to our growing understanding of interconnected environmental processes, but also intersecting international issue area regimes and the notion of global governance more generally including in relation to protection of the environment. And indeed only a few years after this quote, the International Law Commission established a study group to look at the topic of the fragmentation of international law. And within academia and particularly within the discipline of international relations, we see around the same time the emergence in the literature of the concept of regime complexes. Now while typically in academia, I guess there's no agreed definition, what we're really talking about here is an array of partially overlapping and non hierarchical institutions governing a particular issue area. There's general agreement that such a situation generates what we can call rule complexity and that regime intersection is characterized by complementarity as well as oftentimes and I would argue more frequently by tension and conflict. So in terms of international drug policy then this is in many ways I think another dimension of the age old problem of system wide coherence and this is something that Kendra alluded to. And arguably however when we're working towards coherence it's getting more pressing as there's a growing understanding of how what's often referred to as the global drug control regime or various variations of that and then a range of related policy interventions beneath that intersect with an array of interconnected elemental regimes or regime complexes including those relating to two associated areas human rights and then within that indigenous rights and the environment. After all drug policy at all levels of governance is a classic example of a cross cutting issue and these are issues that were flagged up by the CND chair in his opening remarks. Now I think it's fair to say I think it wouldn't be unfair to say that what goes on here in Vienna it's been quite slow to appreciate these interconnections and furthermore where the connection is made some actors inevitably remain resistant and while progress has certainly been achieved in some areas there often remain significant tensions and of course the example for this is between drug policy and human rights and we've seen it in many parts of the commission over the week. Now clearly there has been progress but more work certainly needs to be done and closely related to indigenous rights in particular is a currently far less visible regime intersection where more work definitely needs to be done and this relates to global drug control and what we can define as the global environmental regime or regime complex including within that what we might want to define as the biodiversity regime complex and I think biodiversity is an issue that often gets overlooked in the very welcome debate about drugs policy and climate change and of course it's very important with in in relation to a range of policies targeting crops deemed to be illicit but also again as as Kendra alluded to also in relation to what happens around transit hubs so this slide apologies it's so dense is really an early attempt just to map drug policy on top of existing intersections within the the biodiversity complex and identify points of tension. Now I think of particular relevance is here and this is just what I want to highlight is the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and this is particularly relevant to our discussions in light of the recent COP 15 meeting and the 30x30 target. Now within the CBD there's recognition explicit recognition for the first time that conservation of biological diversity is a common concern for humankind and an integral part of the development process and within this context I think it is in many ways positive to see last year the passage of the the annual AED alternative development resolution 65.1 which within the title as well as the content spoke about measures to protect the environment and among other things the resolution flagged up the work of the CBD and crucially encouraged member states to deploy relevant human development indicators and as many of you probably know within the cow at the moment there's discussions about L3 there's lots of good things in L3 particularly I think the explicit mention of indigenous peoples that would be capital I capital P but we'll have to see what excuse me survives negotiations as the week moves on. Now this point about indicators and metrics I think is crucial in moving away from generalised and abstract discussions and to highlight the need to start thinking in very practical terms about how to facilitate and where necessary soften these regime interfaces and in fact the CBD sets up a framework for impact assessment and minimising adverse impacts that's under article 14 but I think we can and should go further on this for example along similar lines to the idea of introducing human rights risk and impact assessments for new laws and drug policies why not work on developing a specific biodiversity risk assessment framework to model environmental impacts so to conclude then I think as it's been argued elsewhere as complexity and regime intersections increase I think we're likely to see the emergence of a new architecture within which international drug policy operates and where the environment is concerned to borrow the earlier terminology there now exists a web of interactions involving system-wide initiatives like the SDGs crucial documents like the UN system common position on drugs a range of actors beyond member states are UN agencies NGOs and then above this an array of regimes and associated state obligations I think that's the key the key point here state obligations so you know perhaps we might want to call this the global governance complex for drug control I don't know but whichever way it's framed the often conflictual relationship between drug policy and the protection of biological diversity and how that relates to indigenous rights is an issue that's too important to ignore and deserves increased attention at all levels of governance including here in vienna and particularly as we prepare for the midterm review next year thank you thank you thank you very much your words at the sediment I come from San Pase San Mese Guavari it rains eight months a year we have large rivers nuestros ecosistema son la transición entre los andes i el gran bioma del amazonía clave para el equilibrio del planeta colombia es el segundo país con mayor biodiversidad del mundo en los últimos 20 años en colombia están deforestado más de tres millones 100 mil hectarias según el ministerio de ambiente de ellas un millón 800 mil hectarias de bosques estaban en la amazonía unas 90 mil hectarias por año deforestadas solo environmental order in the territory in natural national parks we have indigenous reservations and we have community constitutive sports afro descendants incluso de manera paradogica los ganaderos hacen una serie de estanques para acumular agua para animales especialmente para sud vacas una de las causas asociadas a la deforestation son los cultivos de coca el 52 por ciento de los cultivos de senen areas de manera ambiental 51 por ciento en tierra de comunidades negras 17 por ciento environmental control 4 por ciento en parque naturales y 10 por ciento en tierras communities 17 on forest reservations 4% in natural parks and 10% on indigenous land on a national level in 2021 coca has been part of 8% of the total deforestation according to the institutional studies environmental studies the institute on environmental studies during 2021 in guavyare we deforested 25,000 hectares even though coca was only close to 7,000 hectares something that you can see the illegal um illegal logging was greater than the coca that was grown but you can see now is that in this back the amazon is there cultivation of coca was part of the colonizing forces where there weren't institutions from the government due to a collective burying reform in the center of the country in the beginning of 1980s coca was cultivated close to the central but since we have the first log against drugs culture the cultivation has had to go further and further far away has to be it's true that cultivators have to use chemicals so that they can grow faster and make large quantities of gasoline cement and other chemical agents in the processing of the coca. It's also true that the residual effects of the coca, which is in the process, has an impact on the ground and on the water. The environmental affectations because of the cultivation of coca include deforestation, which can destroy biological corridors, which are important for flotana. This is the most great because we're coca cultivation. As happened, it can change, we can convert into a model cultivation and so families can expect to cultivate their own this food and they look out at the fact that we use these cases to dispute between armed actors to eliminate these cultivations and reduce the offer of cocaine. The state has obviously implemented military bases and police. This has been a weakening in institutionality. The set has been used since the end of the 70s against cultivations of cannabis and marijuana in the south of the region. In the beginning in 1994, the government ordered campaigns of aerial spraying against coca cultivation. During the last 21 years, our territories have been fumigated with agrochemicals from the air and with planes, combat planes. This has been a few years ago. The cultivation of coca has moved from one place to another to get into these reservations, indigenous reservations, natural parkas. We know that there are now more cultivations than in the last 20 years. The data we have looking to see here is to see if 5 million acres were fumigated by air and more than 2 million acres by land. Dozens of thousands of infrastructure processing of pasta vasae has only destroyed without any environmental protocol by the authorities. Tons of chemical waste have been incinerated in the middle of the forest because this has obviously affected water and the plants. The actions to reduce off the offer to reduce the demand caused to reduce supply has caused a duplication of deforestation has dispersed cultivation to zones with greater environmental protection and has affected cultivation of food, the biological cycle has brought out the fauna and particular insects such as bees and contaminated water and water. In addition to these aspirations as applied without any sort of environmental protection to human health. In addition to this, the most worrying aspect is that we find a perverse policy, drug policy. Thousands of families have been displaced from their places. In my region, half the population is displaced according to official data. This has caused by asperity, the asperation. Aerial asperation, aerial asperity, by the loss of security of food security at the break in our economy and our present economy and because of the conflict, this weakening and poverty of people who work in the cultivation and the lack of opportunities by the state has only facilitated a model that means that more of our theater inventory is in smaller hands in fewer hands. This means that the cultivations of cookups are not actually the principal reason to understand deforestation. There is just a point of which we can understand the expansion. Now I'd like to introduce Sylvia from Transnational Institute. Thanks, Sylvia. Thanks, Clemi. I think as all previous interventions have made plain, drugs are unequivocally an environmental issue. I think that's a very, very strong message that we want to send out with the organization of this side event. In the brief presentation that I will make, I want to suggest three opportunities or a triad of recommendations, if you will, about how this debate around the impacts of environmental impacts of drugs and environmental impacts of drug policy can be taken forward. I will go briefly through three recommendations I will make. The first recommendation is to integrate the environmental impacts of drug policy into the 2022 midterm review of international drug policy commitments as reflected in the 2019 CND ministerial declaration. It was already mentioned briefly earlier, but there's also an already agreed upon modalities resolution at this CND that sets out the process and format for such a review process, including the organization of two interactive multi-stakeholder roundtables in parallel with the plenary proceedings on the topics taking stock, work undertaken since 2019, and then looking forward, the way forward, the road to 2029 and beyond. I would argue that in light of government commitments, state obligations really, coming out of both the climate and biodiversity cops, it is crucial that the environmental concerns in relation to drugs and drug policy are integrated into this review process and in the plans for the coming five-year period. As the UN Secretary General has said, making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top priority for everyone everywhere. And it is notable in this respect that for the first time, the 2022 UNODC's World Drug Report included a special booklet on drugs and the environment. This can be a useful platform to build on for this review process. However, I would argue that in this review process, the international drug policy community must acknowledge the breadth and severity of the environmental impacts associated with drug control policies, particularly for countries in the global south. And member states should commit themselves to reforming policies to eliminate this damage. Some of our more detailed proposals for doing so are contained in a response that a number of organisations represented here today issued to respond to the World Drug Report and the special booklet, copies of which can also be found in the corner of the room. So I would encourage you to read it. So that's the first recommendation is really about this midterm review process and the absolute critical importance of integrating environmental issues there. The second recommendation can really be summed up in the phrase, don't go it alone. The agreements of the UN common position on drugs and linkages to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda are all welcome developments that can help to foster UN system-wide coherence and overcome some of the regime contradictions and blind spots that David spoke about earlier. There is certainly much scope I would submit at both in-country programmatic level but also at international regime level for greater interagency collaboration between UNODC and agencies such as the United Nations Environmental Program, Environment Program, United Nations Development Program, the FAO, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to mention but a few to enhance understanding of the drugs, environment, development, nexus. And such interagency collaboration could help in the formulation of what could be called an environmental harm reduction approach that can be used to submit drug control policies to an environmental stress test or a risk assessment framework as was also spoken about earlier. This would not only put an end if such a stress test or risk assessment framework were to be adopted would not only put an end to harmful drug control strategies such as forced eradication or badly designed crop substitution programs but can also be used to predict and prevent future harm moving forward. So that's the second recommendation about breaking silos into agency collaboration, environmental harm reduction and risk assessment framework. The third and final recommendation is really about some international reform processes and it's really looking at how best integrates environmental standards within models of legal regulation. Taking the example of cannabis for example, the environmental record in jurisdictions where cannabis has been regulated is decidedly mixed. On the one hand we see the emergence of a standards testing and trade regime that is driving a lot of cultivation indoors where inter alia the use of high intensity grow lights contributes to high greenhouse gas emissions associated with indoor greenhouse production. This has come at the expense of legacy cannabis growers including in traditional producing countries in the global south where sun-grown cannabis cultivation is the norm. On the other hand the design of environmental standards cannot become so onerous, so burdensome, so complex that it generates barriers to entry for those wishing to transition from the illicit to the illicit market. This cumbersome bureaucracy has for example been identified as one of the main reasons for the continuance of an extensive illicit cannabis market even in jurisdictions where cannabis has been regulated allowing only bigger players or multi jurisdiction operators to successfully navigate the market. This not only facilitates corporate capture but without proper safeguards in place also opens up the door to industry greenwashing. A number of organisations represented here today have been engaging in over the years in dialogues with governments, operators, civil society groups and growers about models of cannabis regulation that allow for social equity and environmental sustainability to go hand in hand. There are lessons to be learned both positive and negative from experiences with transitions from illicit to regulated markets and it's important that the CND can provide a space where these lessons can be socialised and where an honest debate and frank exchange can take place. And this is salient not only in terms of cannabis reform but also in light of the call by the governments of Bolivia and Colombia for an independent review process of the scheduling of the coca leaf. We have heard at this CND both in plenary and in a number of side events this week on this issue. These have included also lived testimony from cocalero, peasant and indigenous communities of the human rights and environmental harms that follow from the persecution of particular plants and the perverse and unintended consequences of punitive drug control policies. Thank you Sylvia. Final sentence and just perfect timing. I would just like to leave you with this thought that I think that repairing this rupture of humans from nature that prohibition really has engendered must be a central priority and direction of travel for all concerned in aligning drug policy with environmental protection. Thank you. Thank you Sylvia and finally I'm pleased to say we have closing remarks from Marta Macado, the National Security Secretary for Drug Policy Brazil. Thank you. Thank you. I thank the Transnational Institute for organizing this session. I think it's extremely urgent that we connect drug policies with environmental protection and when we talk about environment the kind of urgency we have is exceptional. I thank my colleagues that was I was really impressed with their presentations. I just want to give a final comment on the situation on the Brazilian Amazon. I think you all know that the last government interrupted the surveillance on the Amazon. In fact the government exonerated officials who have acted against the organized crime, defended the invasion of indigenous land and supported illegal mining. So during the last government Brazil reached the highest deforestation rates in 15 years. Destruction of the Amazon was raised to historic levels. Illegal mining also has raised and expanded especially inside indigenous territories as never before with dramatic consequences as you all saw the recent images of the Ianomani people dying of many diseases that came with the illegal mining outside the rivers were all undermined with Mercurio and they had no food. So in the fact that the government create this free zone without surveillance it created this coalition or created or incentivize this coalition between networks of drug trafficking and environmental organized crime. So they are now sharing the infrastructure and logistics so they are using the same rules for transportation and illegal mining has been a source of money laundry. So the most important drug cartel in Brazil is now deeply involved with the organized crime in Amazonia and I would make a bracket and say that this big drug cartel in Brazil was also strengthened after decades of politics of mass incarceration and the previous drug policy has a lot to do with that result. I wanted to mention that there is this situation in this within this situation there is a constant violence against indigenous population they are spelled from their territories, the rivers have been poisoned and there is a progressive involvement also with the local populations in different chains of this network. I must say that our main problem is not crops but the transit and other chains of the organized crime and finally indigenous women are constant victims of sexual violence. So this is just to make a brief description of what we're living and how urgent it is that we tackle the problem together. Our minister of justice just established a program that's called Amazonia Masegura, a safer amazon and there is of course a big federal police operation to try to expel illegal mining from indigenous lands and to apprehend all their equipment and etc but besides that we are also sending health care, social assistance and territorial development. This is one of the discussions we're having here at CND. How can we adapt the idea of alternative development to foster territorial development in the Amazonia and combining it of course with environmental protection. We are now also changing the law on the gold chain. There was in fact a problem in our legislation that made that traceability very weak but I also would like to call the responsibility of the global financial market that are receiving gold from illegal mining in Brazil and that comes from the first station and the violation of indigenous rights. So that was really just to call attention to the situation and to reinforce my colleague's speech on the importance of this panel. Thank you so much. Thank you Marta. So we will conclude. Thank you to all of our speakers this morning and to all of our co-sponsors and we will now have a little video. Yn la esquina estrategica de Sur America bañado por el mar pacifico, como puerta de entrada a la Amazonia, está el departamento de Nariño, frontera de Colombia con Ecuador. Nariño es un territorio colmado de oportunidades para conectar a Colombia y Sur America con el mundo. Nariño es un destino turistico por excelencia, una tierra biodiversa, hogar de especies únicas y umedales de importancia mundial, cuenta con ríos i lagunas, reservas ecológicas, volcanes i nebados, playas, ballenas i aves de majestuos o colorido. Nariño es la tierra donde se produce hoy por hoy el mejor café especial del mundo. Nariño es manos laboriosas, personas talentosas, deporte y aventura. Nariño es carnaval, donde se mezclan culturas, tradiciones, mitos i leyendas. Nariño es fe, disesperanza, es trabajo, es gente buena. Nariño es territorio de paz, recorre Nariño. Descubare su magia. Wow, OK. This is how you live. Wow. Great. That was an amazing video. Brings a bit of color to this building. So, I feel we actually have room for a few questions, so we've got five minutes. Maria Alejandro, please. Direct your question to whoever you'd like to answer. Thank you. Thank you very much for this amazing panel. I do believe the need that... Thank you for your work as well. The environmental policy needs to talk with the drug policy agenda. Maybe this is a question for Sylvia, but for the rest of you as well. What do you think about the need of directing, for example, instruments such as the payment for ecosystem services to coca crop farmers or anyone who is cultivating crops for illegal trade? Because I do think that that's an instrument to help with this transition to legal economies, but also to stop the frontier moving to the forest. I can certainly make a start, but if others also want to add, certainly. I think it's an interesting proposal, and I know that I've been very, very initial. Some experiments also in Colombia with payments for ecosystem services in the context of potentially also some coca transitions. The only note of caution I would perhaps introduce here is that, of course, payments for ecosystem services benefit those that already are owners of environmental assets, so to speak, because the payments have to be directed to certain beneficiaries, and often the beneficiaries that are recognised are those already with land titles, or who already have some kind of ownership or management of particular environmental goods and services. For populations that have been displaced, for example, or otherwise landless populations, how payments for ecosystem services can be structured to benefit those kinds of groups is just one concern I have with that mechanism, but I think it's certainly an interesting incentive and reward scheme, and to support communities that are really guardians of the environment. So, certainly holds promise, but there are also some notes of caution. Does anyone else want to say anything on that particular question? Thanks, Miri. Are there any other questions? I can say something useful for you. That is also not a propaganda of our country. President Gustavo Petro has proposed a plan to save the Amazon. That plan, according to his words in Leticia, with Brazil, includes to make 100,000 families of indigenous peasants that are on the northern border of our Amazon, and to pay them an economic value every month during the next 20 years. That value would be $600 a month. That would be the price of today, and the president in our government would need a plan to do something like that. Practically, it's a proposal that doesn't have the fear of prices of paying for services. So that would really leave behind the communities that dedicate to restoring the forests that have been dug up. And it would really be a focus on how do we restore forests. We're going to aim it for environmental services to some communities. We have practices within the contracts where the state doesn't actually give you papers for the land. But it gives you a concession to the families that they can use that land during a certain amount of time. In the previous government, it was 10 years. They proposed 10 years. The family said this doesn't give us enough legal standing, and so they asked for more years. And so these contracts or these concessions could go to families, and they should be long term, at least three years, so that there's security and stability in those agreements. And finally, we have a great worry with these payments for carbon, because there's certain signatures that have happened that aren't really looking at how do we save the Amazon. And some of them have been actions that are really about economic gains and speculation and that don't have to do with the rights of families that live in these areas in our brother country of Brazil. This is a good space for me to say that we are very worried about this. We have one more question. Would you like to stand up? Yeah. Hi. Good morning to everyone. I just wanted to reaffirm what Pedro was saying. A country we need out to country owners can't really think about long-term policy. We need the cobalt invaders or the owners of the land, not that they loan them the land, because loaned land is not taken care of when it's your own land. You take care of it. You love it. And you can administer it with love for our children and our grandchildren. We use it. We give it up to mafia, which can be mining, which can be cattle ranching, but we need a country of our owners in the Amazon. There are serious problems with syniacol, and there are serious problems with it, because there are serious problems with not having stability because there are no man tribes that have not been legally constituted that can take care of protected lands. So we have serious problems where the people see the greed of the forest and they don't see the people who live in those forests. And so we need urgently government with agents, with agents, so that there is a policy really about legal policies and that we can have those long-term public policies. Thank you. Pedro, did you want to come up? Pedro, do you want to respond? No, no. Great. Okay. I think that brings us to the end, and I just want to encourage you all to be curious, be bold. For many people, the environment is a new thing. It's the defining issue of our time. It can feel really overwhelming, but we have to include it in all of our work, and hopefully in years to come we will see the change that we're all part of. So thank you so much for attending and thank you to our co-sponsors and our panel. And our interpreter, Zara Snaps. Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of your day.