FAO statement at Special Event from New York on the International Day of Forests 2023

2023 International Day of Forests
'Healthy Forests, Healthy People'

As prepared for delivery

Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning, it is a pleasure to be here today. 

I thank the United Nations Forum on Forests for bringing us together every year and organizing this International Day in New York. 

Events going on today around the world remind us, that without healthy forests, we cannot have healthy people or a healthy planet. 

Forests provide food and nutrition to almost a billion people – this includes plant products, meat, fish, edible insects and mushrooms. 

Forests also contain many of the 50 000 plant species with healing properties, which play a vital role in combating climate change and storing carbon from the atmosphere in their vegetation and soils. 

In times when poverty, hunger and inequality persist and we are off track to achieve the SDGs by 2030, we need rapid and impactful solutions. 

Forests hold many of these solutions. 

The recently adopted Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework acknowledges the interlinkages between biodiversity and health, calling for integrated ways of working together such as the One Health approach.

FAO has joined forces with UN Environment Programme, the World Health Organization and the World Organisation for Animal Health under the Quadripartite.

One Health addresses complex health challenges such as ecosystem and forest degradation, agrifood system failures and the spread of infectious diseases, in an integrated manner.

Through restoration and responsible management of forests we can contribute to the prevention of health emergencies.

We can support economic recovery through green jobs while increasing food security and improving human well-being.

Forests can help us adapt to and mitigate climate change – the biggest health threat facing humanity, a message also underlined in yesterday’s launch of the IPCC Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change.

Forests contain 662 billion tonnes of carbon, which is more than half the global carbon stock in soils and vegetation. (SOFO 2022)

And they can help buffer exposure to heat and extreme weather events caused by climate change.

And as we are here in New York City, let us not forget that trees are a key element in urban and peri-urban areas, which mitigate air pollution and cool our cities and offer important opportunities for recreation and exercise, and improve mental health and wellbeing. 

In fact, today at the International Day of Forests celebration in Rome a new Award was launched – “The Tree Cities of the World Award”. It recognises cities that make significant progress in sustainable urban forest management, and the Italian city of Turin was the first awardee. 

And FAO’s Green Cities Initiative shows how city leaders can promote urban greening and sustainable urban and peri-urban food production, and contributes to the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, another joint initiative with UNEP and partners around the world to build a strong, broad-based global movement to ramp up restoration across all ecosystems.

Ladies and Gentlemen, 

Despite all of the positive benefits of forests to human and planetary health, we lost ten million hectares of forest each year to deforestation between 2015 and 2020. Wildfires are an increasing problem. 

This needs to change. 

Partnerships are crucial as no single actor has the power, mandate, or resources on its own to deliver the transformative, systemic change, which is needed to achieve all these goals. 

FAO and the United Nations Forum on Forests work closely with other members of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests towards those goals.

There are many other practical solutions we can scale up, and I am sure we will hear more about them today.

The upcoming Food System Summit stock-take, the SDG Summit and the Climate Ambition Summit will need to be utilized to advocate for the role of forest solutions which can deliver important cross-cutting benefits. 

These solutions include:

1. Halting deforestation and enhancing resilience
2. Mainstreaming biodiversity and restoring forest ecosystems
3. Enhancing sustainable production, sustainable forest use and livelihoods

   26.Please count on FAO to continue to work with all partners - in the room here and beyond - to ensure that we have healthy forests, for healthy people and a healthy planet.

4. I thank you for your attention.