UNFFS strengthens collaboration with Yale University

During the last week of January, the UNFF Secretariat participated in a series of meetings and conferences that were held at Yale University that week.

The Secretariat participated in The Forests Dialogue’s (TFD) Restoration Scoping Dialogue which was held from 31 January to 1 February 3023. TFD holds multi-stakeholder dialogues to foster social learning, building trust, and collaborative and adaptive natural resources and land management across sectors. The Restoration Scoping Dialogue was attended by participants from the private sector, international organisations, financial institutions, civil society and representatives of community organisations. The focus was on understanding how to enhance the participation of, and investment by forest-based industries in ecosystem restoration. The collaboration with TFD is part of the UNFF secretariat’s efforts to find ways to strengthen engagement of the private sector and increasing private investments for forest landscape restoration. This collaboration will enable development of policy recommendations on how to strengthen engagement of the private sector in the Forum’s work and the measures required to increase private sector investment in forest landscape restoration.

On 3 February, UNFFS Director, Ms. Juliette Biao presented the keynote address to the International Society of Tropical Foresters conference hosted by Yale. Her keynote address was entitled “Influential Women leadership in Forestry: Lessons learned in view of promoting Sustainable Forest Management through the UNFF”.

Earlier in the week, UNFFS met with Ms. Eva Garen, Director of the Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative (ELTI) at Yale. The initiative provides training courses on tropical forest conservation, public and private forest finance, including training on PES and REDD+. ELTI also runs Leadership programmes, including on industrial plantations, agroforestry, and PES. The courses are run on-line with some having a field component. During the meeting, the possibility of collaborating with ELTI in developing and running on-line training in forest finance and other GFFFN related activities was discussed.

The Secretariat also met with other Yale faculty members to explore interlinkages between their research and the work of the Forum, with a view to strengthening the science-policy interface in the Forum. In this regard, the possibility of collaborating with Yale’s Applied Science and Policy synthesis programme was discussed, as well as possible organization of joint virtual webinars/seminars to share outcomes and recommendations of research on issues of mutual interest.