European Forest Week, Rome 21-24. October 2008

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

It is an honour and a pleasure to address you all at the opening of the European Forest Week in Rome. The forest sector plays an important role providing welfare in societies throughout Europe.

Historically, forest resources have been an engine for growth and prosperity in our region. As you are well aware of, this development also put the forests under pressure. Deforestation and forest degradation took place to a large extent. Reports of sparsely stocked, degraded forests was the common output from the first national forest inventories almost hundred years ago in Norway and many other European countries.

Much later, the forest also bore signs of a more indirect degradation caused by our economic activity. Defoliation and signs of forest dieback were observed in some places in Europe. This led to a pan European political process aiming at protecting the multiple services of our forests, later known as the Ministerial conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE).

Through this process we have managed to establish a common understanding of what should be regarded as sustainable forest management in Europe. What we have achieved is unique, but unfortunately not well known outside our sector. While we know that there is a well functioning cooperation between the different entities working with forest and forest policy issues in Europe and the UNECE-region, many of us would probably be disappointed of the level of knowledge about our processes and activities that exist outside the family, so to speak.

We like to see ourselves as the ones that, through policy cooperation, participatory processes and science based forest knowledge, are developing the shape and direction of the forest policy. This is only true if we manage to interpret the needs of, and interact with society and the dominating political processes of our time.

As put on the agenda at the fifth Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe in Warsaw last year, forests, wood and energy and forest and water are highly relevant topics when tackling challenges posed by climate change. One of the objectives of the European Forest Week is to raise awareness about the forest based sector and its important contributions to mitigating climate change, providing freshwater and protecting the environment. To succeed with this, we need to reach out to a broader audience than the one we are familiar with already. There is no need to convince the believers.

The European Forest Week gives an excellent opportunity to consolidate our sector and make it clear that the capacity and different work programs of the MCPFE, the Timber Committee of the UNECE and the European Forestry Commission of FAO are designed and utilised to work together for forests in Europe. It is this cooperation that has made it possible to achieve the progress in sustainable forest management that has taken place in Europe. But we should not forget that as we speak here, decisions that will influence our sector are also taken elsewhere.

Among people, institutions and governments of Europe there is a rapidly growing concern about sustainability of the production of certain forest products. For the forest sector, both public and private, this represents an opportunity as well as a challenge. The foresters’ role should be to give guidance on the possibilities that can be found within sustainable forest management. It is our duty to keep the long term view in mind, but this can prove to be difficult when the demands are overwhelming, and the short sight solutions seems more tempting.

Interacting and trying to understand the deep concerns that are found around us, we should promote the view that sustainability criteria related to forest-sourced feedstock should build on existing, well developed schemes for sustainable forest management. In Europe criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management developed under the MCPFE-process should be used as a basis.

An example of this way to approach new challenges can be found in the development of a new set of pan-European guidelines for afforestation and reforestation, which I hope to see adopted at the expert level meeting of the MCPFE later this year in Geneva. Furthermore, we should make efforts to provide input to processes in other sectors on how to monitor sustainability based on the experiences we have collected in the forest sector throughout decades.

While our hearts should remain in the forest, our minds need to go outside more often. I wish you all the best for the forest week, and that you will have fruitful discussions that can further promote and develop the forest sector to the service of society.

 

Thank You