1st & 2nd March 2023 | Libreville, Gabon.
Registration open from 1st to 28th February 2023.
The One Forest Summit in Libreville was announced during COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, by President Emmanuel Macron and President Ali Bongo Ondimba.
This summit will be an opportunity to advance and renew our collective ambition regarding the conservation and sustainable management of forests, which are essential to address interrelated global challenges, foremost among which are climate change and biodiversity loss.
Registrations finished!
Why a Forest Summit?
As announced by the President of the Gabonese Republic Ali Bongo Ondimba and the President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron during COP27 in November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh, a One Forest Summit will be organized on March 1 and 2, 2023 in Libreville in Gabon. This summit will be a key moment to move forward on climate action and the preservation of biodiversity, by promoting solidarity between the three major forest basins on a global scale: the Amazon forest, the Congo basin and the tropical forests of South East Asia. The protection of these three forest basins is a global issue. By sequestering
millions of tonnes of CO2 1 , these forest basins play a critical role in regulating the climate. By flora and fauna
they contain, they are home to treasures of biodiversity. And by acting as buffers between human societies and the microbial cycles of wild spaces, they play a key role in preventing the emergence of new epidemics.
Why a Summit in Gabon?
Gabon, a country whose territory is 88% covered by forest equatorial region, one of the two main green lungs of the planet, is at the forefront in the fight against global warming and the protection of biodiversity, which were very early raised to the rank of priorities at the national level. As a pioneer, Gabon has also voluntarily committed to protecting a third of its natural spaces, both land and sea. Preparing for more than a decade for the post-oil era, Gabon has adopted an economic model combining industrial development and sustainable management of its natural resources, as shown by the exploitation of timber, of which Gabon is one of the main global producers.
What will be the objectives and concrete progress at this Summit?
This Summit, which will bring together Heads of State and Ministers from three continents, will address the issues related to the preservation of the three major forest basins, following the historic agreement reached in Montreal on the protection of biodiversity. We sometimes oppose the protection of forests and the economic development of forest countries, which for many of them are also subject to strong demographic pressure. The aim of the Summit is to demonstrate that the two objectives are reconcilable: managing a forest in a sustainable way allows both to preserve the ecosystem services provided to humanity and to increase its economic added value for forest countries and local populations. . Concretely, the One Forest Summit in Libreville will not aim to have new political declarations adopted. The ambitious framework, we already have it: it is the one set in Glasgow, then in Montreal during COP15. The challenge will be to implement this ambition by offering forest countries, with the help of many scientists, business leaders, investors and NGOs, a platform of scientific and economic solutions to help them reconcile the protection of their forests and economic development.
The first objective will be to provide the major forest countries with very concrete solutions to enable them to draw economic benefits from more protective forest policies: By developing more sustainable sectors for products that will be sold at higher prices on international markets and will benefit more to local populations. Such sectors already exist: this is the case for wood for the construction and renovation of buildings, which constitutes an innovative solution for reducing the carbon footprint of our infrastructures. Food products from agroforestry and other responsible practices also have great potential: coffee, cocoa, rubber, etc. The challenge is to support these sectors to support their scaling up, and stimulate demand for these products or materials, in particular in line with the new European policy to combat imported deforestation. An economic forum for forests will be organized in Libreville to accelerate the development of these sectors, thanks to the sharing of know-how, training and new opportunities for economic partnerships. By remunerating countries that reforest and thus increase the sequestration capacity of their forests. Private players have a major role to play in this respect through what are called “carbon credits”: in concrete terms, a company that wishes to contribute to the fight against global warming can invest in projects that increase the net sequestration capacities of the forest, for example through land restoration or reforestation projects. In order to avoid any green washing, we are going to bring together the players in Libreville who are involved in the segment of this market which has the most environmental integrity, and which thus brings the most benefit to forest countries (with high-yield projects, some exceeding $30 per tonne of C0²).
Finally, some areas of the forest are still intact and represent vital reserves of carbon or biodiversity (e.g. mangroves), which must be protected within the framework of parks or biosphere reserves. The Libreville summit will also make it possible to launch innovative mechanisms to finance these protected areas, through positive conservation partnerships (PCP), following the initiative launched by France and the Global Environment Facility on the sidelines of the COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The One Forest Summit in Libreville will not be just another summit. It will be a useful summit for action, the large-scale implementation of certain vital decisions for the future of our planet.
