The critical role of forests and the landscape – Outcomes of the PEFC Stakeholder Dialogue (Part 2)

5 December 2016 Driving innovation

Have you read Part 1 of the outcomes of the PEFC Stakeholder Dialogue - Sustainable landscapes key to sustainable livelihoods?

Our Stakeholder Dialogue brought over 200 people to Bali, Indonesia on the 17-18 November 2016 to explore the forest sector’s role within the context of Sustainable Landscapes for Sustainable Livelihoods.

Emerging from the event was a number of key messages, including:

Tackling global challenges with forests and trees

We need to work collectively to bring more widespread recognition to the ability of forests and trees to contribute to solving global challenges - from climate change and poverty, to food security and biodiversity loss.

The need for strong economic viability of forests and forestry underpins the role of forests in the landscape.

We need to work in a multi-faceted way to ensure there is a strong value proposition for landowners to engage in forestry and certification.

Whether that be strengthening the profile of wood as a green product and growing market demand, or better quantifying, communicating and valuing forest’s contributions to the global agenda.

Nurture connectivity and explore new forms of collaboration

Scaling up the forest sector’s contribution to sustainable landscapes will require new forms of collaboration to cross sectoral and stakeholder divides.

We all have a role to play in ‘nurturing connectivity’ to new levels and creating opportunities to establish dialogue and interaction around identifying shared values and goals. Exploring synergies between different commodities, verification programs and other initiatives promoting sustainability can offer potential to efficiently scale up and deliver more impact.

A landscape approach may provide a unique ecologically-inspired, development paradigm for this connectivity to flourish.

Forest certification has a critical role to play

The dialogue examined what could PEFC do, or do more of, towards supporting healthy, productive, and equitable landscapes.

Building on forest certification’s mainstay in supporting the delivery of sustainable forest management, participants also discussed the role of certification in additional areas of tree-based landscapes: verifying sustainable management of protection or set aside forests within agricultural land, trees outside forests, landscape initiatives and in forest restoration initiatives.

Beyond this geographical expansion, the meeting emphasized the need for certification to deliver more value to farmers and land owners, especially those operating in challenging, rural environments in developing countries.

Breakout sessions facilitated the sharing of diverse views on tough questions like: How can certification better support improved productivity of tree assets? How can certification systems remove the barriers for low-risk smallholders?

Recognizing the sheer global diversity of forest-based landscapes there were many opportunities identified in the Dialogue for certification to scale up, out, down and wider.

Simultaneously there was a strong call for certification to increase the benefits that landowners derive from certification and to simplify complexity and reduce costs, especially for smallholders. The tension between expanding out versus contracting focus and from exploring new opportunities versus simplifying were present throughout the meeting on a number of different issues.

With the diversity of perspectives that the global dialogue enabled, it was very clear that one size will not fit all.

Undoubtedly, national stakeholders and national certification systems will need to continue adapting and evolving with sophistication, nuance and flexibility to fulfill the needs and opportunities apparent within the country.

Exploring the linkages between forest certification and landscape approaches

“Hosting the PEFC event in Indonesia gave us the unique chance to consider the interaction between forest certification, the landscape approach generally, and specific landscape initiatives ongoing in Indonesia,” said Sarah Price, PEFC International while summarizing the meeting.

“It was interesting for our global audience to reflect and discuss Indonesian initiatives especially since integrated landscape management is not a new solution in many countries around the world."

"There were many ideas shared on how forest certification could support landscape initiatives, and how landscape initiatives in developing countries could establish better framework conditions to make certification more feasible and accessible for farmers and forest managers operating within the landscape,” she concluded.

Collaboration and cooperation need to be a core focus

Achieving sustainable solutions for sustainable landscapes, for sustainable livelihoods, requires all of us to work openly and collaboratively to achieve a lasting outcome.

We need to reach out to everybody who wants to contribute to our joined efforts, identify the most appropriate ways forward for individual country settings, and realize the potential contributions that everybody involved can make to have a real impact on the ground.