Report (Part 4): Sustainable Development Convention 2002

Tropical Forest: Palm Oil and Soy

Time: 30 October 2002, 16:00-17:00 Location: Salle C3 Presenters/ Participants: Thomas Vellacott, WWF Reporter: Zhenying Wu (ICVolunteers) Languages: English Key words: Tropical forest, Indonesia, WWF, plantation, palm oil

The world's forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. A good part of the burned or logged down forests are being transformed into plantations. Lately, the rapid raise in new palm oil and soy plantations has been identified as a major threat to tropical forests, notably in Indonesia. WWF has launched its Forest Conversion Initiative, whose objective is that by 2005 high conservation value forests, freshwater ecosystems, habitats of key species are no longer threatened by the expansion of palm oil and soy in Indonesia.

To achieve the goals of the Forest Conversion Initiative, WWF works in the field, by identifying the most valuable forest zones (highest biodiversity) that need to be absolutely preserved. Stop logging totally is not a realistic goal, so WWF focuses its efforts on helping on land use planning, certification programs and setting up environmentally sustainable plantation operations. WWF does also lobbying work at international investment institutions (by asking banks to agree to a set of environmental criteria for investments into pulp & paper or palm oil companies), markets actors (for instance the Migros supermarket chain in Switzerland agreed to put on sell only sustainably produced palm oil brands) and local governments.

A very big issue is how to provide an economical alternative to logging for the local population, without which no forest protection initiative can be sustained in time. Making a region sustainable is meant not only in the environmental sense, but also in the social and economical ones.

The goal of the presence of WWF at this event in Geneva is to meet companies and other NGOs and build awareness in the general public (since palm oil is not usually associated with forest destruction)

Surprising Issues
An audience member asked what WWF thinks of initiatives involving financial incentives given to the local population in exchange of forest preservation. Mr.Vellacott answered that his organization finds the idea interesting, but does not believe that it is very scalable or sustainable, since it always relies on external donors.

Interesting Questions
A participant brought to notice the fact that WWF seems to focus on the need to preserve rare species as its main argument against the destruction of forests, and wondered whether the fact that cutting down forests has an impact on climate change should not be also considered. Mr. Vellacott answered then that in some sense, since plantations also consist of vegetation, they are sometimes classified into forests, so their impact on climate change is unproven. But plantations are monocultures whilst tropical forests harbor many different and sometimes unique species.