Pachauri, Southeast Asian Ministers, UNFCCC COP20 President to speak at Forests Asia

CIFOR has had a tremendous response to the Summit from across Southeast Asia and around the world. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will give a keynote on climate change and landscapes. Peru Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who will be President of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s COP20 meeting in Lima in December, will share his vision for how forests will be tabled at this critical meeting. Other confirmed speakers include Ministers from across Southeast Asia, CEOs and the world’s leading scientists and green-growth experts.

An updated agenda including session abstracts and background reading is online now — visit the summit program for regular updates.

• REGISTER NOW: Registration is free for Government and UN officials, and subsidized for citizens of developing countries and students.
• MEDIA: Are you a journalist? Join our media workshop, which includes a field visit.
• YOUTH SESSION: Are you between 18 and 39 years old and passionate about the role you can play in forestry and development issues? Join our Youth Session — travel costs will be covered for moderators, so apply now.
• PHOTO CONTEST: Are you an amateur or professional photographer and want to showcase your work on forests and forest dependent communities? Join the photo competition now.

February was a momentous month for the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the next global development framework, and Forests News was busy reporting on it. The final meeting of the UN Open Working Group on SDGs included a presentation from a CIFOR scientist.

Also, in an op-ed in the British newspaper The Guardian, CIFOR Director General Peter Holmgren called for forestry to be included in the SDGs — and proceeded to show how this could work.
 
FACT FILE: What are the SDGs, and what does forestry have to do with it? Click here.

This month on Landscapes.org: A special series on the Sustainable Development Goals, leading donors call for putting land rights at the forefront of the post-2015 development agenda, and how do we measure forest’s many contributions to development? 

More landscapes news:

• MOSAICS: The role of diverse land-use mosaics play in sustainable development is increasingly recognized across the globe — Landscapes.org brings together success stories from Peru, Indonesia and Ghana.
• EN ESPAÑOL: ¿Habla Usted español? As preparations for COP20 in Peru begin to ramp up, our landscapes infographic has been translated — please feel free to share with your Spanish-speaking stakeholders.

Peatland fires in Indonesia are raging again, covering the region in a thick haze — just as they did in June 2013, when wind-blown smoke choked the skies of Singapore and Malaysia. In a bid to prevent this crisis from recurring, CIFOR recently gathered top stakeholders from governments, NGOs, civil society and the private sector from around the region to map out further research of the issue and to begin untangling the knot of governance that perpetuates the fires.

Can we feed an ever-larger population without degrading forests and other natural resources? New research is investigating alternative ways of producing food with minimal damage to fragile ecosystems. To that end, CIFOR is aggregating information to provide an overview of where “landscapes approaches” to food production have been successful and where they failed — and we need your help. Click here to find out more.