FAO Forestry Roadmap seeks innovative solutions to global challenges

Rome – A new roadmap guiding the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on forests was endorsed on Wednesday by members at the 27th Session of the Committee on Forestry (COFO 27) in Rome. 

The FAO Forestry Roadmap - From Vision to Action 2024-2031 sets out how FAO will work to enhance the role forests play in meeting forestry-related goals and targets and in addressing global challenges in coming years. 

“The FAO Forestry Roadmap highlights FAO’s dual emphasis on the protective and productive functions of forests and the role of innovation as a driving force to shape the future of the world’s forest sector,” said Zhimin Wu, Director of FAO’s Forestry Division.

Three objectives

The Roadmap highlights three objectives: forest conservation, forest production, and innovation to increase the forest sector’s contributions to global solutions and accelerate sustainable agrifood systems transformation. 

For each objective, priority actions are identified to accelerate progress towards achieving the objective and the globally agreed goals and targets. These actions include halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, enhancing production and productivity of forestry and agroforestry systems, scaling up innovation, providing policy and technical support to countries, strengthening forestry education, securing ownership and user rights for local communities and Indigenous Peoples, and developing innovative finance solutions. 

The document sets out how the Roadmap will be implemented at country, regional and global levels, in collaboration with FAO Members and partners. It will be reviewed and adjusted according to lessons learnt along the way.  

Forest solutions

Forests are a vital force in the fight against climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, hunger and poverty. Covering a third of the world’s land, they provide food, fuel, fibre, medicine and wood and non-wood forest products to people worldwide. They are home to the majority of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, and store more than half the global carbon stock in soils and vegetation.

Yet despite the importance of forests, an estimated 420 million hectares were lost to deforestation between 1990 and 2020. And although the deforestation rate is slowing, urgent and strategic action is still required to address the major drivers of continuous forest loss, including deforestation, wildfires and pests, and to restore degraded forest ecosystems. 

FAO has a mandate to work globally – with both normative and field-level interventions – on food security and nutrition, poverty elimination and the sustainable management and utilization of natural resources.  It seeks to restore forests, improve the lives of forest-dependent people, and support countries to manage their forests in a sustainable way.