 The Forest Conservation, Livelihoods and Rights Project (FC) participated in the International Conference on Poverty Reduction and Forests: Tenure, Market and Policy Reforms, held in Bangkok from 3 - 7 September 2007. The Project sent three researchers to the conference and organised for one of its Papua New Guinean collaborators to attend. The conference objectives were to 1) discuss how forest management can contribute to poverty alleviation and the livelihoods of forest-dependent people, 2) identify the role of forests, forest communities, enterprises and other stakeholders in promoting poverty alleviation and economic development, and 3) to strengthen and build stakeholder networks to advance tenure, market and policy reforms. The conference gathered over 300 participants from Southeast, South and East Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the Americas and Europe. The plenary sessions consisted of presentations, discussions and reporting back from sub-sessions.
The six sub-sessions divided the participants into smaller groups to discuss in detail particular aspects of the conference theme.
IGES contributed to the facilitation of a sub-session on forest certification on day 3 of the conference, which was attended by 34 participants.
During the sub-session FC researchers delivered a paper and a poster presentation on their third phase research on forest certification in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Laos. The Project’s PNG collaborator also delivered a paper and poster presentation during this sub-session. The rich discussion after the presentations led to the following recommendations for “moving forward”: 1) Develop a labelling system that identifies wood products from community enterprises; 2) Use fair trade and forest certification in a complimentary manner to make international markets more accessible to communities; 3) Develop stepwise approaches specific to the certification of community-based forest management; 4) Encourage forest certification standards setting bodies to look beyond certification of production forests to audit environmental services (including carbon), and 5) Government to play a proactive role in promoting forest certification (capacity building, awareness raising, extension, piloting).
FC is continuing with its research on innovative approaches to make forest certification more accessible to community-based forest managers during its 4th research phase. |
