Who decides on forest matters?

The key messages of SciPol’s latest assessment on International Forest Governance were brought up in an interview at the Forest Pavilion during UNFCCC COP29.

IUFRO’s Science-Policy Programme (SciPol) participated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) 29^th Conference of the Parties (COP29), held from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan. With a focus on discussing climate finance, nearly 200 countries and around 75,000 participants met at COP29.

In order to emphasize the important role that forests have not only as tools to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change, but also as providers of goods and services essential to life and well-being, SciPol coordinated IUFRO’s input to create the first ever Forest Pavilion in a UN Climate Change Conference in collaboration with other forest-related organisations.

On 16 November 2024, the day that the Forest Pavilion dedicated to Science, Technology and Innovation / Digitalisation, Nelson Grima, Coordinator of SciPol, brought up the key messages of SciPol’s latest assessment on International Forest Governance during an interview. These key messages can be briefly summarised as follows:

The former dominant concept of a centralized International Forest Governance (IFG) in the form of legally binding, or non-legally binding intergovernmental agreements has continued to shift towards a more pluralistic understanding of IFG.

A major critique of IFG is its 'limited effectiveness', particularly in reference to its failure to adequately address deforestation, forest emissions, and biodiversity loss. Yet, IFG is still presented as the dominant solution to this problem, resulting in an 'Olympics' of pledges and targets.

Forest-related finance for IFG has increased in complexity, with constantly emerging new policy instruments, incentives, standards, and targets in a wide variety of forms. This growing complexity is supported by actors and institutions with interests in short-term economic gain, rather than sustainability and a transition towards just forest governance. Alternative finance remains rare.

In the past decade, a 'climatization' of the forest governance discourses has taken place, which becomes evident in the growing public and private forest carbon markets.

Formerly, the critiques to IFG were focused on technical aspects, but this is shifting to forms of critique that address social problems such as power asymmetries, justice, post-colonialism, or exclusion. Often, these critiques focus more on uncovering underlying power relations rather than offering specific suggestions for political solutions.

One major conclusion from this assessment is that the complexity of international forest governance is steadily increasing, and further efforts to coordinate actors and arrangements at all levels are urgently needed.