Abert y cyfnod ffordd o'r llesoedd o'r cyfnod o'r cyflwyno gydag yma, a'r ddysgu'r cyfnod o'r Fygrifodol Fyrwyrmwr wedi'i wneud i gael'r ffordd o'r cyflwyno. Ond rwy'n Enry Bonn, y taelwyr yma, ac y ffordd o'r cyflwyn yma. Ond rwy'n dda hwnnw ddyn nhw'n gydag, o'r ffordd o'r llesoedd o'r llesoedd. Rwy'n gydig i'n gwybod ar hyn o'r cyflwyno ar y Cwriadol ar y Fygrwyr. I'm going to invite a number of people onto the stage. Amy Duchel, senior forestry officer, team leader forestry and climate change. Amy, you go there. Peter Moore is a consultant, a fire management specialist with FAO. Lara Stile, who is a forestry officer in the forest fire management team at FAO. Francesco Gaetani will be joining us online, and Francesco is a science policy regional coordinator for the United Nations Environment Programme. So that's going to be Francesco. And we have Jesus San Miguel, senior researcher at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. Jesus, thank you very much indeed. You're all welcome. All right, so we need to set the scene. I've already mentioned the intensity, the ferocity and the duration of these fire seasons, occurring in a whole variety of habitats. But fire does have two faces, so I'd like you to focus your eyes on the big screen behind me as we run this video. I've got coordinates and size for spot number two. Thank you very much. That was a good video. That was very, very brief, but to the point. Okay, so in a moment we're going to hear from Peter Moore, who will present the Global Fire Management Platform Proposal. But first, for some opening remarks, and Amy, you may want to respond to what we saw in that video. I'm going to give the floor to Amy Duchel, senior forestry officer team leader in the Forestry and Climate Change Division. Amy, over to you. Thank you, Henry, and thank you all for being here, including many who are online watching this event today. And in fact, I'm here on behalf of Tina Vahanen, the Deputy Director of the FAO Forestry Division, who was called by the Chair of COFO for Emergency Business. So this is what happens during COFO. But I'm happy to be here, and really a pleasure to be here with partners from several countries who we'll hear from, including the Republic of Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, Argentina, Ghana, Brazil, and global partners from the Green Climate Fund UN Environment Program, and the Joint Research Centre of the EU. So we'll have this panel and then another panel to hear about that. And I mean, I think it's very clear wildfires are everywhere, and in the news, and those who weren't even paying attention to climate change, now they are, right? Okay, so I think we have an important opportunity, in fact, to address the climate crisis, including through integrated fire management. And FAO's been a proponent of integrated fire management for a long time, and I'm sitting here with one of the experts on this, who you'll hear from in a moment. And we're also now launching this new initiative with UNEP, which we're very excited about, and other partners on the global fire management platform, which we will also hear about today. And, you know, one important aspect that we do want to highlight in the global fire management platform is the focus on indigenous and traditional knowledge, and as a key component to a holistic approach to fire management. And we're very lucky to now have a lot of style with us at FAO, who's worked on this a long time in Brazil and the Amazon region more broadly. So we will hear today about, you know, innovations in integrated fire management already in place. We will hear about this proposal for the global fire management platform, which is underway and actually needs all of your help to make it something that we can all work on together and learn about how the platform can support the efforts that are already ongoing, because, of course, integrated fire management, this is really a topic globally, nationally, that many people are already working on, and we can join efforts to do something together to manage fires for climate and people. So, thank you. Amy, thank you very much for those opening remarks. You've set the scene perfectly. Well, we both defer to Peter's knowledge in this particular area, because he has been really working hard on this global fire management platform proposal. You said, Amy, there's a lot of knowledge out there already, indigenous knowledge, traditional knowledge, and it's important, as you said, to understand. It's not about wiping out fires altogether. I think it said in the video there an essential part of the ecosystem, the naturally occurring fires, for a layman like me or a person who just watches the news or presents the news and thinks, oh my God, there's a fire. We have to put it out. What is the difference between the two?  Peter, it's over to you. I mean, I'm a layman. So please tell us about this global fire management platform proposal. Give him a round of applause. But he's going to tell us that this is something we're very excited about. So let's tell us, yeah. Thank you very much, Henry. I'm very excited about it. Have been for many years, for decades. So if we can have the presentation up, please. You just saw in UNEPs, in that short video, a lot of the things, the reasons that we're going through. So UNEP and FAO are collaborating with others and we have some up here on the stage and some of you down there and then we're talking to many different organisations and people to develop a fire platform. You have to point it out there. Just some background and some context. Obviously fires have been with us for thousands of years, as humans, tens of thousands of years. And the issue that we are facing today has been with us for many decades. FAO in that time has supported countries in fire management through that time, providing analysis and guidance. Today, on the COFO 26 agenda, there are two items on forest fires and there's this side event. So it's something that has a lot of importance and that is being increasingly recognised. The Global Fire Management Platform was announced at the World Forestry Congress. Henry mentioned the Congress in Korea and two directors of FAO and UNEP announced that there'd be this collaboration. We're collaborating to bring together the global experience we have in space and in time. FAO has many, many country offices, over 130, and lots of global networks that can be tapped into. If you're going to get a group of people together and a group of agencies to work on something, why focus on wildfires? Well, we just saw in the video some of the downsides, some of the bad fire, the two faces of fire. It's an increasing risk that it poses for people in the environment and we should note that eliminating the risk of wildfires is not possible. There are many of us in this room that have spent decades of effort and we know that is completely true. And that's because firefighting has very clear limitations. There are quite strong limits to what humans can do and what technology can do in terms of suppressing fires. So the answer to that is integrated fire management. That's to bring together social and environmental dimensions. Social is critically important because people light 90% of the fires. It's not arsen. There's accident, misadventure, need for use for livelihoods. And therefore we need to work with them and they also suffer most of the damage and loss. So we need to look at those dimensions of social, society and people, culture at the environment. And then in particular, as Amy mentioned in her remarks, traditional and indigenous land management. Humans have been on landscapes for tens of thousands of years. We have worked out many, many different ways of managing and working and living with those landscapes. So that's key. Another reason for working on them is because wildfires are very widespread. So the dark of the red in this history of 20 years of wildfires is then the more fires there are. You can see that Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, Northern Australia, parts of South America have very high incidences. But virtually throughout the world there are fires. This slide is a bit different because it shows that compared to the long term what's happened in the last five years from 2014 to 2019. If the colour is blue then the number of fires has reduced. If the colour is red then the number of fires has increased. So you can see that the world in different places, different things are happening. So it's a global issue, it's changing and we need to work with it. Why have a platform? Fires are increasing and they're increasingly impacting. So we need to strengthen fire management through integrated fire management. And one of the reasons for that is that in my experience, in different countries in the world the solutions to every problem in fire management already exist. The methods, the tools, the thinking, the approach to data, the analysis, it already exists. The tragedy is it doesn't exist in one place. And so there isn't a country that's really got the whole picture together. And so we need to take that capacity and leadership and demonstrate a way of bringing people together with their part of the solution, their piece of the jigsaw, to work with others and the best way to do that is to have a platform where we can exchange. And doing that, we'll leverage the existing UNEP and FAO partnership aligned with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration but other partnerships as with the Joint Research Centre of the European Union with the Global Fire Monitoring Centre and other international initiatives that already exist but aren't well connected. We have a platform, there's some good ideas, it's a good point in history to have it. What will we do with it? A knowledge hub is obviously a key thing. It's a key and interesting thing. We talk about integrated fire management. People who do social sciences, environmental sciences, cultural and anthropological sciences don't often talk to each other and so we need to bring those together and a hub is a way of helping to do that. We'll provide accessible technical advice and information as I mentioned, there's a lot of it but it's not available consistently when we'll stimulate collaboration and contribution from those partners. The idea is to be a place of sharing. Fire risk assessment and early warning is another element. Many countries don't have a system and while fire risk assessment, while it's emerging, it's not yet a fully formed discipline and so we'll be working with that to communicate those methods and tools in other places and across the world. A lot of the things that I've just talked about are technical, about meteorological information, fire information, data, etc. And we're very good at those things. What we're not as good at is the softer things, the policy support. How do we make sure that agencies within a country are working together? How do we make sure that the community is engaged through the next level of the jurisdiction to the national level? How do those communications, how does that governance get framed and formed? And so there'll be quite a focus on integrating integrated fire management into national and sub-national policies and of course the platform will look at future modes, future modules and things as needed. One of the things we'll be doing is linking existing fire efforts. I'm sure amongst all of you down there and certainly up here, we know that FA and UNEP have some joint initiatives. There's the Forest Resources Assessment, the FAR that many of you will know about, that will from next year on be including an update on fires and their management fire incidents. We have the UN Decade on Restoration, a massive global effort that's also something that has to be looking and is looking at fire and its management and of course the UN Red that so many of us are involved with or touch upon that is also looking at results-based payments in relation to climate change during our gas mitigation. There are many technical developments. We mentioned one here which is a fire monitoring module that's being developed in FAO under the CPL module platform and there are many many others that are happening. We have a lot of partners, I mentioned the Joint Research Centre and the Global Wildfire Information System. So the platform will not reinvent any wheels. It will just make links and connections to the people that are already doing good things and help them to communicate and bring them together with others that need their skillset. Include in that I mentioned earlier the Global Fire Monitoring Centre which is an enormous repository of past activities in history which is an incredibly valuable resource that we need to look at. Thank you very much for listening. I look forward to discussion that we're having today and hope you're all completely interested in fire management and that you stay that way. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Peter. Peter, stay there for a second. Yes, clap. Because it says any questions there is there a very immediate question an immediate response to what Peter has just presented while it's top of your mind right now. Speak now or forever, hold your peace. Just very quickly Peter, how urgent is this particular innovation? How urgent is the need? I personally think it's really really urgent and the main reason for that is that there are pieces of information ideas and methods and tools that get made and then get lost. So if we don't start quickly some of those will be lost. The second thing is that what we're talking about in integrated fire management it takes a long time. This is not a quick fix. It's not a silver bullet. You need to be working with communities and cultures, governments and agencies and so on and building that rapport, that relationship is a long term effort. So the sooner we start the sooner we make progress the sooner we build momentum. Peter, thank you very much indeed. Please take your seat. Now you talked about not reinventing the wheel but about linking current fire efforts because it's an awful lot of very good work going on and that's great. You talked about those key organisations, FAO of course, we're here in FAO, UNEP and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. We need to hear from each organisation exactly how they're going to contribute to this platform and make sure it works because it's all very well developing a new platform but then it can weather on the vine if people aren't using it properly and feeding into it properly. So let's hear from our colleagues from those three agencies. First of all, Lara Stile is here Forestry officer in the Department of Forest Fire Management. So Lara, you can explain how exactly you and your colleagues are going to feed into this. Thank you so much Henry. Yes, the efforts of FAO to build this global platform will be focused on, as Peter said, connecting the initiatives, the lessons learned and the expertise already in place around the globe. Integrated fire management is an approach where the dialogue of knowledge is a key point for its success. It's important to connect the knowledge and experience from science practitioners, managers, communities and, as already mentioned, indigenous and traditional peoples. We have already made many important efforts in this direction. FAO has a long history in fire management. FAO's first publication, The Topkey, is from 1953, long time ago. And also FAO promoted the development of fire networks that are active and hold deep expertise on fire management. And taking advantage of this technical know-how of FAO and associating it to the know-how of other important initiatives like the Global Fire Monitoring Centre that is coordinated by a well-known fire person, Johan Goldhammer, who has more than 30 years of history and expertise and experience on fire management. And also the Global Fire Monitoring Centre is linked to 14 regional wildland fire networks. So connecting these initiatives and inspiring actions, we intend to promote cross-boundary integrated fire management and strengthen local, regional and national capacities. It's important to mention that the development of the platform is an open tent for the collaboration of other institutions so everyone is welcome. FAO will also bring to the platform the FAO methodology for integrated fire management that we call the 5Rs. Review and analysis to understand why fire is happening and how is happening in the territory. Risk reduction, we have to focus on prevention. Reginess, we are not going to stop all fires in the whole world so we have to be ready to respond. The fourth R is response and the last one is recovery. It's also our interest to have an expert database at the platform so the countries, regions and stakeholders who need advice and technical support on a specific aspect of integrated fire management will find a specialist in the platform. Also we will focus our efforts on the innovations for a global platform. We will highlight the importance of the human diversity, gender, equity and inclusion, empowering indigenous and traditional knowledge. Important initiatives in Latin America for example are being carried out related to indigenous knowledge and the experience there shows that the participatory and the intercultural approach allow improvements on minimizing the damaging fires and look into those local solutions including them in a global platform where countries, institutions and the stakeholders can learn from them it will be possible to generate global positive outcomes. So the idea is local solutions for positive global outcomes. Thank you so much and over to you. Thank you. I was trying, you may not have seen, I was trying to direct Lara's eyes towards my stopwatch for minutes. That's exactly what you did. Thank you very much indeed.  That was wonderful. Thank you very much for that. A lot of technical know-how and expertise which we're going to draw on and then one particular word, well it's two words, kind of lept out at me cross boundaries. So you're going to be working across these boundaries as you must because the fire knows no boundaries either. You see what I'm doing there? Very good. Excellent. Well no, but it's true because sometimes these metaphors are worthy of being used and if a fire knows no boundaries how can you know boundaries? You shouldn't. Excellent. So let's move on now to UNEP and we have Science, Policy, Regional Coordinator, Francesco Gaetani and Francesco is online and is going to give us his remarks to explain how UNEP is going to feed in and to coordinate in a transboundary way into this platform. Over to you Francesco. Yes, thank you indeed. Good morning everybody from Panama city and let me start my very short remarks with an expression of gratitude to be in this session and to participate in this session together with FAU and also to express our satisfaction to continue this work with FAU to find concrete and viable solutions to reduce the risk of fires and to reduce the impact on fires on society and ecosystems. The today's event follows a quite successful discussion held in May this year at the World Forest Congress where a fire management platform was presented together by UNEP and FAU and also as mentioned before the publication of the quite interesting and important report spreading like wildfire which received an overwhelming response in terms of downloads and interest from very different readers all over the world and this actually is very much clear to us and it is very much clear that we need to work together FAU and UNEP to find a solution to work with communities to work with countries and to provide them the capacity and the tools that they need to reduce the impacts of wildfires on their lives and on the ecosystem where they live. From an observational perspective speaking from Latin America in my case and starting from the assumption that the vast majority of wildfires are closed by human activities including land use land cover change including deforestation of course afforestation but also important global stressors like climate change and other under stressors that are related to the conditions of climate we should also consider the fact that there is an evidence of a clear increase in the frequency and the magnitude of these extreme weather conditions or notably water extremes and these conditions are in most of the cases the reason why the cause why the vegetation that in general would not usually burn is becoming a suitable fuel for the ignition of massive large and very dangerous wildfires so climate change climate vulnerability land use and land cover change and all these factors are very very strong reason for us to start working on these and to see how we can work especially on the prevention phase and on the reduction of the risk and exposure to wildfires in Latin America in particular wildfires are becoming a really a real important threat for ecosystems last year we had a massive wildfire that burned one third of one of the most important natural wetlands in the world which is the Pantanal and this is a clear sign that wildfires cannot be considered as an event that is part of the ecosystem because there are conditions especially climate conditions that are actually changing the normal fire regimes in ecosystems like wetlands that usually were not affected by wildfires and in this context achieving the sustaining adaptive land fire management land and fire management requires a well-designed combination of policies a very clear legal framework and incentives that encourage appropriate land and fire use and in particular as mentioned by my colleagues before is very critical to engage with communities including indigenous group local authorities and especially in wildfire prone areas to understand and accept the residual risk of wildfire and to strengthen coordination of key stakeholders that are part of the prevention and response mechanism in place to reduce the risk Francesco I'm taking advantage of the pause to invite you as they say in Ghana to land landing means drawing your comments very rapidly to a close because you're over your time have you made your substantive points we'll add another two points which are first of all we need to work in the prevention phase and to work with meteorological and hydrological services to enhance early warning service and early warning systems capacity and also we need to work in the red in the red context to enhance our capacity to assess the risk of wildfires to protect the buffer that are part of the red program and this concludes my remarks thank you thank you very much indeed Francesco Gaetani thank you very much indeed excellent oh yes okay you see Francesco you've got a round of applause here in the room here in the red room and it's not easy to get a round of applause in the red room excellent okay so we're now going to move over to my colleague our colleague on my far left so Jesusan Miguel who is a senior researcher at the JRC which is part of the European Commission to explain how you're going to feed into this and hopefully help coordinate and build on the knowledge that is already out there yeah well thank you very much say first day I would like to thank FAO for inviting me to this panel I'm really honoured to be here and see how we could contribute to the global fire platform a little bit of my institution I come from the Joint Research Centre which is a technical body of the European Commission and our role is specifically to provide data to enhance evidence-based policies in the European Union the idea in with regard to the global fire platform is similar the idea is to provide evidence that can support policies and further implement further implementation of integrated fire management I will focus on four points that I think are the main points in which we can contribute something that Peter mentioned is that something that is very important is the wildfire risk assessment wildfire risk assessment requires data requires information on past trends current trends evolution of number of fires evolution of the fire season impact of the fires in the last 10, 20 years so in G-WIS with the help of FAO we have implemented something that is called country profiles that provides this type of information trends a country and sub country level for all the countries around the world that can serve as a basis to develop wildfire risk assessment clearly with the limitations of global data but and the collaboration with FAO is not new so we've been collaborating with FAO many years in Europe and that brings me to my second point the second point is that we are developing platforms networks to support policy making and shared data among countries shared not only data but good practices to mention that countries don't stop in the borders and that is precisely why harmonized or standardized information is needed countries many countries have information systems and they are very valid and the problem with the information systems in each country is that they are country tailored so the information from around countries often not comparable to the information from another country that's why regionals or global information systems such as when Peter did the presentation he mentioned the global wildfire information system can help sharing harmonize or standardize information among countries furthermore with FAO we collaborated in Europe establishing what is called expert group on forest fires which brings together all the European countries plus countries in North Africa and Middle East so this collaboration has been really a success and it's still ongoing and that started over 20 years ago the idea in the global fire platform is to do something similar to provide the networks or platforms that can serve to discuss about the integrated fire management and policy making at regional or global level we have recently established with FAO and UNEP what is called the expert group on forest fires in Latin America and Caribbean and we are meeting with the national fire managers twice every year we had the first physical meeting because of the pandemic it was the first one in Santiago at the end of July and we will meet in Brazil in November FAO has participated from the beginning and of course we expect and hope that they will continue collaborating the same as UNEP or in the case of the Amazon the Amazon cooperation treaty organization so that could be the second point in networking and establishing platform the third point is on doing fire monitoring fire managers not only need to do wildfire risk assessment they need to monitor what is ongoing in the country so in the global wildfire information system we have established a platform that is updated continuously daily for all the countries around the world in which we provide ongoing statistics of number of fires burnt area impact of those fires emissions etc and that can serve many countries that do not have a system and can serve as a reference for those countries that have information systems and that could be my third point and finally my fourth point is not so technical but it's also interesting I think because the programmes under which we are working are very stable programmes of the European Union so we are working under two main programmes one is called Tei Amazon Team Europe Initiative on the Amazon that is focused on Latin America and the Caribbean and another one is called Copernicus so the space programme of the European Union and all these platforms that we are developing with UNEP, FAO, ACTO are under these two programmes which provide stable funding and continuity which is really needed because Peter mentioned that the problem with fire information is that until now it has been scattered in systems that were there for some time but then they were dropped so with the global fire information system I think we can guarantee that we will provide the platform of data and information that can serve and support the global fire platform thank you wonderful thank you very much that's really good thank you very much indeed that's really really good thank you very much Jesus and yeah I'm really interested in this this country profiles that you're doing and risk assessments so that countries can be aware of where they are in all the indicators that might put them at risk and act accordingly we've got a couple of minutes wriggle room I think and if we want to take advantage of that now with a question I've got a question certainly I want to ask but if ah yes gentlemen there and please put your microphone on and tell us who you are and make your question brief please could you move to the seat next to you maybe and it's that one is working as well are they not on sorry Marco yeah I know this wasn't part of the program but the red room gives you special fiery energy to coin a phrase so thank you sir Thomas Hausmann ahead of the liaison unit of forest Europe which is a ministerial process of 45 european countries to promote sustainable forest management I was very happy to listen and all the panelists that prevention and preparedness is a key this is exactly also the way we are working however our experience with policymakers with ministers decision makers is that they are not so much interested in this phase they are maybe showing up once a fire need to be fight it if a forest fire plane has been bought and my question to the expert is could you give us concrete advice how to shift the interest of policymakers of ministers more to the prevention and preparedness phase thank you thank you Thomas prevention is always better than cure and that's a saying in almost every language in the world who wants to take that question Amy Peter yeah okay there we go thank you Marco thank you very much it's an extremely valid point and it's an experience that I've had many many times over the years and it seems with social media and things it only gets to be deeper and more and more separated because of the instantaneous nature of things so suppression firefighting is what we see all the time I mentioned that one of the reasons for for starting the platform quickly was to that this would take time and unfortunately really good integrated fire management it's incredibly difficult to take a good photograph of something like that it's it's not terribly exciting I mean it's exciting to me and it's exciting to communities that are involved in it and governments and agencies that are involved but it's not politically or socially exciting necessarily so I think the advice is one of the big gaps in the points in the things we're discussing is that we don't have an effective consistent assessment of the damage and loss you'll see insurance company estimates but that's only for those that are insured you'll see other people's estimates but they're very rough there's not a consistent methodology you won't see human health factored in very often or very well and you won't see dislocation and the trauma of the events that affect people so once those costs are added up and the damage and losses assessed then the idea of preventing or reducing that by 10 percent 15 percent 20 percent whatever is is a very strong argument that can be held so we need to pick up on Jesus's point we need more data so we need the risk assessment but we need the data that helps us to make that point at the moment the suppression expenditure is about 10 times the or the losses and damage are about 10 times what we spend in total on suppression so if you speak to the politicians and the policymakers in a language they can understand and that the voters the taxpayers will understand maybe you'll cut through I'm just going to try and squeeze in one more if we have one Marco I know you're ready to take the microphone to anybody else if we have one if not then we'll move on but ah yes so there right in the middle and be as brief as you can and we'll try and respond briefly yes my name is Hervé Levit I'm working at FAO my question is about the platform itself are you going to look also at solutions when the fires have happened you know what are the advice to give to the people and to the local people and probably the governments and so in terms of what next how you can valorize the wood itself it's a big issue and also what to do after do we keep forest or do we change completely that's a big debate in France for example when we had these big fires in the west before they were you made zones do we keep the forest as it is or not yeah so that's my question about the the role of the platform thank you very much Peter it's interesting because we had a discussion this morning with our Indonesian colleagues with Lara and Amy and I and one of the things that we looked at for the platform was about techniques in this case we were talking specifically about fighting fires in tropical forests there isn't really a body of knowledge about that so that's one of the things that would happen which would address that in terms of restoration the UN decade on ecosystem restoration is obviously the place where those techniques those methods history et cetera can be bought can be bought to be and I sympathize greatly with France with the decision frame that it now has of what to do with I think it's now three times eight thousand eight days or something in the past two years thank you very much put your hands together for the panel Peter Amy Lara Jesus and Francesco thank you but that was a really good great session we're now going to change panellists so I'll invite you to leave your seats and move off the stage thank you very much indeed because we now have a second panel we're moving into another phase of our discussion we're now going to move to the countries we heard about the experience of France just a moment ago countries advances where they are and also their needs when it comes to integrating fire management so I'm going to invite Ms Gina Kim who will be online she's the director of the international corporation division at the Korea Forest Service Mr Ul Caracocci who is here a forest engineer he's part of the general directorate of forestry at the ministry of agriculture and forestry Turkey and then we have Dr Rhaffylas B Panjantan who is an expert staff of the minister the landscape fire ministry of the environment and forestry from Indonesia Mr Martin Monaco director of forests the ministry of environment and sustainable development from Argentina so Mr Martin Monaco I think he's here yes thank you very much and online will be Ms Lucy Amissa research scientist forestry research institute of Ghana I can see you Lucy Amissa there very good day to you and also I can see Ms Gina Kim thank you very much for being there and also last but not least Mr Carlos Lopez Max Achali indigenous leader and president of the national confederation of family farmers and rural family entrepreneurs so thank you very much indeed for joining us okay so there are two questions which I'm going to put to you and you can answer in one go I'm going to start off with Madame Gina Kim from the Republic of Korea what relevant innovation in integrated fire management is happening in Korea I think I heard a bit about this when we had the World Forestry Congress in Seoul so what relevant innovation and also how you see this global fire management platform that Peter has just launched supporting your work thank you Mr Henry a good afternoon I'm Gina Kim I would like to begin my presentation by thanking the FAE colleagues for inviting me to this meaningful event to share the Republic of Korea's practice system on integrated forest fire management the Korea Forest Service has its own team dedicated to forest fire prevention and control moreover as a KFS self-liated organisation the National Institute of Forest science conduct forest fire related and research past fire used to occur frequently in Korea during dry spring season April to May but recently forest fire in Korea happened all year round except for rainy season July to August it is because the dry condition continues due to extreme weather caused by climate change also the scale is growing along with increased frequency in March this year Korea saw the largest forest fire in its history which resulting in huge damages to property the KFS thinks that integrated approaches required for forest fire management so the forestry agency has the comprehensive measures to forest fire and the measures include plans for forest fire prevention preparedness and suppression in this regard I would like to briefly explain the Korea's measure for the forest the thing to reduce the density of forest for fire prevention and planting of trees to create to forest more resistant to fire moreover we expand the forest rules that serve as fire break as the forest fire prevention stage second we provide a real time of fire danger by administrative districts while comprehensive referring to weather by a danger index and other factors for accurate forecasting the KFS established mountain weather station nationwide to collect and analyze material logical information in forest the ROK has an official period of high fire danger designated according to the of fire forecast during that period there is restriction of assess to mountains and use of flammable items such as cigarette and lighter third regarding the forest fire suppression the KFS has affiliated agency the forest aviation headquarters the headquarters confront forest fire with the fire suppression helicopter it has 117 helicopters with the 2000 to 8000 leaders of water capacity fourth Korea scientifically analyzed the boundary and the damages of the forest fire hit area with the video footage of the satellite and the drones in order to restore the reason then conduct one on site inspects based on the analysis and we established practical plans for forest restoration through active communication with export to local community forest and civil group and carry out the restoration activity properly finally Korea promotes innovative responses to forest fire ritualizing cutting edge scientific technology the Korea Forest Service operates a system that identifies the situation of the forest fires nationwide in real time we are able to precise monitor the onsite situations through the GPS based fire watch system for reporting fires and identifying the outbreak location that is all I would like to introduce the Korea's integrated fire management assistance and regarding the second question the global fire management platform first of all I would like to congratulate on establishment of the foundation of the global fire management platform developed by FAO and UNEP I believe this platform will become a significant opportunity to enhance the management capacity of member states by sharing knowledge and information related to fire management with each other in this respect I would like to thank FAO and UNEP for providing such great opportunity it is my thought that wildfire would require different strategies for the prevention and suppression depending on geographically and the material logical condition and onsite situation the Korea Forest Service has great interest in global cooperation on forest fires so it's pushing ahead with the project on restoration of fire heat area and fire prevention with Mongolia I think that if member states share fire related information together through the global fire management platform it will become a great help for implementing bilateral and multilateral projects on forest fires I look forward to the platform to help member to improve their fire danger management and increase investment in reducing the fire danger as you may know the Republic of Korea officially launched the Assuring the Future of Forest with integrated risk management mechanism with FAO on the occasion of the fire management forum held at the 15th World Forestry Congress it is my hope that of a mechanism and a global fire mechanism platform a management platform will contribute to enhance fire responses of FAO's member countries thank you thank you for your attention much indeed Miss Kim for giving us that very detailed perspective perspective from the Republic of Korea Marco you did warn me he did warn me this is a technical guru and his team and they said to me Henry because of the delay give them a chance when they're online and I didn't because I'm so hot and energized I'm so keen so Marco sorry about that okay fantastic before we move on to the Republic of Turkey I would like to invite Mr Petri Voranan senior forest and land use specialist from the Green Climate Fund to join us on stage because when we have heard from all our panellists we'll then want to hear from you via the GCF thank you very much indeed for that for joining us now so let's find out what's happening in Turkey and I'm delighted to invite Mr Ur Karakocchi who's with the general directorate of forestry at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to respond to that question so the relevant innovation in integrated fire management what's happening in your region and also how you see this platform supporting your work over to you thank you so much thank you so much yes give the floor to me first of all after maybe one years ago we changed our name of the country Turkey yes Turkey yes not Turkey anymore yes Turkey thank you so much now I would like to start to give you a short information about what's going on in Turkey about the forestry so different from the other countries 99% of the forests are governed and owned by state so for forest fires we have own fire management department and we are combating the fires with our own department so we have own vehicles own personnel and also we have a grant vehicles and air vehicles as well to combating the white fires so it gives us an advantage because if you utilize from the forest engineers they will aware of the forest structures and their forest engineers as well masters on this issue and they can know how to combate well and then effectively so I would like to give an information about the forest fires in Turkey like the 60% of Turkey is really sensitive areas for forest fires so like as the other countries which are really sensitive countries we should improve ourselves and we need to keep up with new technologies for combating forest fires and we need to know that is not only our issue is already global problem and we are already aware of that we have this responsibility as a Turkey so I would like to give some information about some innovations what we are doing and which vehicles we are utilizing from so last two years Turkey Turkey is producing you see you see right your colleague is here not colleague he's my general director that's why I'm second even worse Felly we are building a pool for only forest fires. Like in Turkey, in total we have 4,500 forest fire pools in the forest areas and it's really advantage for helicopters and the ground power to take the water through the forest fire place. Felly, o ran ydych chi'n gwybod y gweithio cyllid a'r amser cyllid yw'r amser ddechrau, hefyd, y dyma'r amser cyllid a'r amser, y cyllid cyllid, ychydig cyllid gwybod i'r amser. Yma'r amser yw'r ydych chi'n ei wneud bod yn ei gael i'r gweithio a chi'n gweithio i'r amser i'r amser i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r amser. Felly, mae'n gofio y cwmdd. Yn gweithio gyrfa'n gweithio'n gweithio arall. Mae'n gweithio arall. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio ar hoffa ac ar bell. Mae gennym ei bod yn gallu'n gweithio ar gyfer y platformau. Mae'n gweld i'r gwaith ar gyfer y cyfle o ysgol. can come together here and we can share our experiences in this hub so and we can intervene and we can come up with new technologies and we have a chance to keep up with the new technologies. I would like to also finalize my sentences. In Turkey we have a training centre in Antalya also and we are hosting the people and experts from the other countries as well. Up to 60 people can come to our country and then we can host them so we have a system to simulate for a simulation for the forest fires and then they can easily see what we are doing and what they can do with these simulations and thank you so much. Thank you very much. Very good indeed. Mr Uruk Karakocs from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Turkey. Thank you very much indeed. Now let's move to another country which has good reason for being on top of this and we're talking about Indonesia which is huge forest areas and we have Dr Raflaz B Pan Yntan who is the expert staff of the minister in the ministry of agriculture. The landscape fire ministry actually. So please talk to us about innovation in integrated fire management in your region and how this platform can support your work please. Need a microphone? Yes. Over to you sir. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Moderator is very active and energetic. I'm to be glad here.  First of all I would like to inform that Indonesia since 1984 so many cooperation with the NGO especially for forest fire management. But at the time until 2015 its activity is business as usual. Try to suppress the fire. But since 2015 when the big fire I think all of the world is known 2.6 million hectare was burned over Indonesia and at the time President Jokowi make a new decision new paradigms. So his top suppression activity and change to prevention and what we are doing with the prevention the first all the planning should go to prevention. The activity early warning system involving local people, the tech of the fire in the villages because mostly I think over the world fire is come from the ground. It's not from the iron. Sorry. And then we calculate we measure all the villages and then we make action to make petrol by involving all local people and villages and stakeholders also private sector. So it's come all the integrated and then also we make suppression by if the fire big by using the iron suppression and also water bombing. And the second Indonesia by decided by Ministry of Environment decided that law enforcement to all the company if they haven't have any brigade to control to manage their area and give a high sanction or penalty to the company if they are not prepared all equipment. And then activity. And the third Indonesia makes one of the solution permanent by using technology weather modification. The last two years I think we have done and by measure from the satellite the number or the percentage of the moisture or water to the ground is very high. It is to help the peatland area because the peatland area is very prone if they are dry and easy to burn. However even if the peatland is dry if there is no one to put the fire I think Indonesia is impossible because by research I think 90% is fire by human being. So that's why when we set up the new system we told the president to ministry we should touch the local people in the ground. What we are doing to make to involve them to all activity and give them a new livelihood because most of them clean their area by fire because to plan something to fulfill their livelihood. So this new government now is changed and then give some area of forest for them planting and then they can harvest the non timber product. It sounds as though you have really been getting on top of this in Indonesia which is excellent. Can you briefly now talk about the platform and how it could support your already excellent efforts. Now we have already some system in Indonesia. We call it Sipongi. We can detect all the hotspots all over Indonesia and then we can go through the ground to check and if fire they stop it. If you have the program we can collaborate it. How it can be done in Indonesia because Indonesia is specific. You cannot generally put your integrated program in Kalimantan same as Sumatra, same as Java. So because local people is different and the species of the soil is different and the content and the local and the government is something is difficult. So we should go little by little and to touch them how important this forest fire should be stopped by giving them not to stop but to give some way out for the local people. So an example for increase the diversification of the product for local people inside this forest. Thank you very much. Thank you very much too. Dr Rhaffylas B Panyaitan from the landscape fire ministry of the environment and forestry. We have got a couple more speakers, two of whom are online and of course one here in the red room Mr Martin Monaco who is director of forest ministry of environment and sustainable development. Martin, you're going to speak in Spanish and we have also Lucas Titon who is going to be replacing Carlos Lopez but we're not going to you yet so please don't do the link yet otherwise it's going to keep delaying. Now I believe you're going to speak in Spanish as well I think so because there is no interpretation for us up here there are no headsets I'm going to put you at the two of you one after the other in a moment because I want to go down and put the headset on so I can hear what you're saying. Not yet so we're going to go to Madame Lucy Amissa now research scientists at the forestry research Institute of Ghana and you're part of the regional Sub-Sahara wildfire network we're going to go to you and then we'll hear from Mr Martin Monaco and Mr Lucas Titon so we can both hear both in Spanish I believe yes so Lucy Amissa over to you. Very much for this opportunity and I'd like to thank FAO for inviting me to participate in this panel discussion and in Ghana fire continues to be a problem. We have a high forest zone of Ghana which is paprika moist forest over 30% of the area experiences on our fires and in the savannah we have almost 90% of the areas experiencing on our fires and of course the savannah fire is an integral part of that ecosystem in the forest zone until 1983 we're not having much fires in that zone. There are a few fires that occurred occurred in the dry semi-desidious part of the of the zone and so from 1983 up to now Ghana has been putting in measures to ensure that we are able to manage these fires. We have a PNDC law 229 that gives direction as to how fires should be managed and which institutions are supposed to be involved. In the past the issue of fire use was seen as a bad thing by the regulation, but in 2006 the country formulated a new wildfire policy and the policy recognized the useful use of fire in livelihood activities. And so a lot of guidelines have been developed to help farmers to use fires and responsibly in their day-to-day activities. In the forestry sector the forestry commission now uses a manual operation for manual procedures for fire management in that forest zone. So the point is to be able to integrate fire management into their day-to-day operations. Largely I will say that fire management in Ghana is really community-based and the knowledge of local communities are taking very seriously and so far we've been able to integrate their knowledge into fire management. We did a survey that looked at the role of fire in farming systems and we noticed that farming without fire would be impractical for a lot of farmers in the country because they use fire as a means to reduce labour. So the management of fire in Ghana focuses very much on prevention and preservation activities and this is because most often when the fires get large it is very difficult to suppress them. The Ghana National Fire Service have a division that enforces management of fires within forests, but because of the original focus of the department which is basically structural fires, sometimes it's very difficult for them to be able to help suppress fires occurring in the natural landscape. And so community fire volunteers have been used to ensure that fires that are small carrying within the local communities are suppressed. And so focus is very much on training these fire volunteers and a lot of volunteer groups have been established within the communities to help. Now looking at our relationship with people in the sub-region, for the past 10 years we joined the Global Fire Monitoring Network and so I have been leading the Western African Network and we are working together with the Global Fire Monitoring Network to be able to share information across the countries in West Africa. Because we noticed that whereas other countries seem to be moving advancing forward with fire management, others are lacking behind them. So the platform offers an opportunity for us to be able to share knowledge and conduct training together. Recently we established the West African Regional Fire Management Resource Centre and the idea of the Resource Centre is to be able to generate, archive and interpret and then disseminate scientific technical knowledge on landscape fires. We also want to use the Centre to support and advance landscape fire management training courses and then combine those practices for professionals working in the institutions with a task to landscape fire management. We also want to conduct and facilitate consultation on cross-border cooperation in fire management, including cross-border instances. And the idea is also to be able to develop a geoporter for forecasting of fires across the region. One of the key problems in Ghana is that a lot of restoration projects are taking place but people are not conducting fire risk assessments prior to planting and so planting are done in the whole area gets spent. We think that when fire risk assessments are done, fire risk maps are provided for these areas to help restoration practitioners to do the proper planning. We also lack information for predicting fire behaviors in these areas. And so I think that the new platform that FAO is launching would be a good avenue for us to receive or share information concerning fire and weather data, fire and carers information. I think that we will be able to model the fire occurrences in the locality. Very much indeed. Lucy, Omeesa, Hase, Ghana, you know the expression I have to let you land and you have now landed. So thank you very much indeed for giving us the, as you're smiling because you know the expression very well. You've now landed. I cannot let you take off again. So thank you very much indeed for giving us the excellent perspective of Ghana and explaining how you can work with this new integrated platform. That's excellent news. Now our next two speakers, so from Argentina and then also from Brazil, what is going to speak in Spanish and what is going to speak in Portuguese, I believe. So, and because I don't think we have interpretation up here, but we do need to hear what you say. So I'm going to ask you to make your remarks from the podium here and I'm going to do you speak Spanish Spanish? Well, I don't. So I'm going to go down there. OK, so I'm going to ask you to make your remarks. Do you speak Spanish? Well, you want to hear what you have to say. So we're going to have to go down and listen. There's no headsets. So let's welcome our next speaker, Mr Matam Monaco, Director of Forest Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development from Argentina. Please, sir, you now have the whole stage. Thank you very much. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand the other positions of my panel, but I could hear the previous panel. And the truth is that it is a pleasure to coincide in concepts, in ideas, to understand the involvement of local communities, the mutual learning of experiences and tools that, as I said before, were created to solve some problems and that can be a tool for other countries, both to learn and to share experiences and also technology, tools that are increasingly important in combat and especially in prevention and forest fire combat. Argentina accounts, as it has been for more than 25 years, with a fire management system, a national fire management system, which is integrated by different institutions, both national ministries such as Defence, Security, the Argentine Army, national parks, the national park administration and the Ministry of Environment, and also by all the provincial jurisdictions within the system. It has an articulation scheme that allows, above all, to articulate and cooperate mainly in combat and forest fire, where Argentina has a huge surface, it is diverse and it also has a lot of particularities that have to do with the diversity of forest ecosystems with which Argentina counts, and that requires a lot of particularities and the cooperation between the parties always makes the treatment, in particular in combat, much more efficient, more effective, and especially when they take important dimensions, as unfortunately in Argentina has happened in the last three years, where we have had particularities of a drought that is more than three years old, a historical descent of the Paraná River, which has provided a lot of fuel material that did not exist before, and a lot of other circumstances that have occurred in the last years where forest fires have been very important and rural fires also of pastures and other ecosystems. That has been recorded by a situation that I think has also been mentioned, something that is linked to productive practices, to customs, traditions. In Argentina more than 90% of the fires are of anthropic origin, they have a direct link with human actions in a 90%. And that also, today it was said in the previous panel, to have a clear idea of the causes, it is for the Argentine system, a fundamental tool to design strategies to be able to start fighting from prevention, from management, from a task that has to be done from education, from the consent of civil society to start to decrease the risk of fires in the country. Particularly from the Ministry of Environment, and particularly with native forests, Argentina has a law of forests that works all over the country, and in particular also with the payment for results that we have obtained in the year 2020 from the climate green fund that we run with FAO. We have a component dedicated to the issue of forest fires, with a look that also coincides with many things that were proposed in the previous panel, and it is basically focused on advancing to strengthen the preventive silviculture schemes. We understand that the management of fuel is together with prevention, with consent, with the diffusion work and capacity of both producers and brigadists, and especially in the framework of a general environmental policy. In addition, the silviculture, the management of the ecosystems is a tool on which we have to advance. I just said that we are in a situation of important drought in Argentina, more than three years, and that changes the dynamic of the ecosystem, predisposes the fuel, the fuel material in another way, to which we are not used to driving, and that also requires a study that allows us to evaluate those conditions, to be able to follow those conditions, but to act as a consequence, especially with a preventive look. It is clear that a managed native forest makes the occurrence of the fires decrease, and it is no less important that the magnitude of the fires that occur, because we know that they are going to continue to occur, is much smaller, is more manageable, allows us somehow to avoid some disaster, I could say that we have had in Argentina and that we have also seen in other parts of the world. The funding that we have obtained through PAWP will allow us to advance and deepen in that line, which is, as I said, and I think that we have reflected it also in those concepts that have come back to the time of presenting the platform, is, as I said, focused on management, and especially with the particularities that each region has, as I said, Argentina, as I say, is very diverse, and requires a very local look that focuses on the particularities that are, in short, to fulfill the objective, efficient tools. In addition, the system, as I said, has a monitoring system, early alert system, that is developed in Argentina, but very likely, and I anticipate your question, you will probably be able to share the experiences in terms of making the monitoring more efficient. Today there is a digital tool development, a lot of tools that will surely make the monitoring more efficient, for prevention, but also for combat. Surely, being able to share the experience of the tools will make us have a better system and better results. Thank you very much indeed. I'm glad I came down, so I could hear what you had to say. Yes, I hope you understood everything that we were saying, because there was no interpretation for us up here. Fantastic, thank you very much. Okay, so, penultimately, yes, and we could resume our seats, and before we hear from Mr Petri Vorinen, who is a senior forest and land use specialist at Green Climate Fund, and we're building up to the launch of a publication, the key role of forest and landscape restoration in climate action, which will be given by Lucy Garrett, finance specialist for forest and landscape restoration forestry division at Faw, and Lucy is just sitting there, so that's how we're going to close off this particular session. Let's go over to Mr Lucas Titon Andrade, who is the National Secretary of the National Confederation of Family Farmers and Rural Family Entrepreneurs, con afer, who is going to give his perspective. Over to you, senior. No, good morning. Well, here in Brazil, it's still good morning. I was speaking English. My name is Lucas Titon, and I'm the National Secretary of Communications for a Confer, which is the National Confederation of Family Farmers and Rural Family Entrepreneurs in Brazil, which today is one of the largest representatives of a sector with more than 10 million people. Today, I'm here representing the president of the confederation, Carlos Lopes, who is also an indigenous leader. Unfortunately, he was unable to participate today. Well, in addition to working for Brazilian family farming, we also carry out work to preserve the environment, valuing indigenous people, their culture, and their preservation practices. One of our great highlights in the work to prevent fires in all of our six biomes, mainly in the Amazon, which has been suffering from gigantic deforestation through criminal fires by illegal loggers and prospectors. Indigenous communities have been managing fires in savannas and forests for thousands of years. This management was suppressed by governmental environment agencies following the trend of implementing ineffective zero-fire policies in protected areas. The disastrous consequences of these policies led on a fair to implement prevention work on its own with the indigenous people, especially the integrated management of fire through prescribed burning. This process begins with the survey of traditional knowledge and then the zoning of the territory, planning, execution, monitoring, and evaluation of results, integrating traditional knowledge and technology platforms. Our biggest success history is in the Shingu National Park, which today is home to 17 indigenous nations and is one of the most vulnerable places to forest fires. We worked on training and preparing Shingu indigenous people to fight fires locally, which drastically reduced them. On the platform presented, whenever we take new technologies into community actions, we have to evaluate the possibility of integrating everyone in the process, especially those in the affected territories through a training process, mainly. The Confederation welcomes this innovation that will bring it to our traditional and original base, a revolution in the way we manage the territory and preserve fires. So it's just a brief comment here because actually our president couldn't be here today. So I'm just here to make a general panorama of how the work is going here in Brazil. Mostly we do this work with the indigenous people, valuing their traditions of fire preventing, of how to manage fire, and also including technology in this process, uniting the better things of both worlds. So I congratulate FAO and COFO26 for their work, and I thank you all for the attention. Con Afaire here in Brazil is available to discuss and plan, join actions. We hope that you guys will talk to us and together we can work together to manage the fires, especially in the rainforest. After all, I thank you very much for this opportunity to explain a little bit of our work, and let's keep this panel going. Thank you so much. We don't get the echo. There you go. Hopefully all our... Yes, it's gone. All our country perspectives, which is excellent, so we now know everybody is doing tremendous innovative things in their own region, and specifically in their own country, and feeding into the platform, hopefully successfully, moving beyond boundaries, which is what everybody has been saying from the Tokie, from the Argentinian perspective, from the Indonesian's perspective, the Ghanaian perspective, the Korean perspective, the Brazilian perspective. This is excellent news. So what is the perspective of the Green Climate Fund? How are they going to feed into this? Well, we have with us a senior forest and land use specialist, Mr Petri Vorinen, who can give us a sense of how useful this is going to be for you and how you're going to connect with it. You want a microphone? That would help. This might be useful. So thank you very much for the invitation and the possibility to actually be here and speak to you and give a little bit of our points of view when it comes to fire management and integrated fire management approaches. So for those who don't know about Green Climate Fund, we are relatively small and relatively new organisation based in South Korea. We have been operational just for five, six years.  So we have a portfolio of roughly $46 billion as approved projects around the world. And on the forest sector, it's still a bit small, but we are working on it. So it's roughly $3 billion. And when it comes to fire management, unfortunately we don't have a single project on fire management yet. But this is something that we are going to change. But on the other hand, we have in some of my projects or many of our projects in the forest sector, we have fire management components. So we are supporting countries in establishing early warning systems, development and implementation of fire management plans, establishing community fire brigades, awareness raising, capacity building, et cetera. But it's clear that we need to, and we have to up the game a little bit. And so the good news is that during the coming replenishment of GCF, which means the next coming four or five years, forest fires are going to be one of the priority areas in the forestry sector in our books. So that's what it means, that we need some good project ideas from our partners and from the countries. And integrated fire management is actually taking many of the boxes, good boxes in our books when we are talking about what is a good project. It is contributing to both adaptation and mitigation goals. It is cross-sectoral, forestry, agriculture, livelihoods, health. We are involving the local people using the traditional knowledge, enhancing collaboration inside the countries, horizontally, vertically and across the borders, which was mentioned here, between the countries. So it's taking many boxes and also it has very clear linkages to other important up and coming themes as GCF, which is working with indigenous people, local communities using the traditional knowledge and health. And health, we are talking about now, haze and small pollution and the health impacts of those. These are things which are coming up and integrated fire management is basically linking these three themes very nicely. So summarising my intervention, we want to fund fire management-related projects and we need project ideas. And now I emphasise the ideas. We don't need to have concept notes of these 50-page complex documents yet. I need just two pages because we are very keen on working with you, the countries and the partners, developing these ideas, the concept notes and further the funding proposals. And we have even funds available for this. It's the readiness funds, $1 million per year per country just to do gap analysis, feasibility studies and develop concept notes. Further, to develop funding proposals, up to $1.5 million to develop a funding proposal. There is money available. Just contact us, reach us out and let's work together. There is money available. Just come and ask nicely. Petri, thank you very much indeed. That's wonderful. Usually when people come to these events, it's to ask for money. Here's somebody who wants to give money, but to not just concept notes, to genuine ideas and projects. There is money to work with countries to develop these ideas and turn them into something real. The money is there, the projects are not yet there. They're not meeting you yet, but they will hopefully come. Let's give our round of applause and thanks to all our speakers. Thank you very much to Petri Foranin, Lucas Tetron, Andrade, Madam Lucy Amisa, Mr Martin Monaco was also with us. Mr Ur Karakocz from Tokyo, Dr Raflesby Panyaitan, thank you very much and also Ms Gina Kim. Thank you very much indeed. We're now going to transition to the final part of our session. Thank you very much. As we are making our transition, let me remind you of this because the next international wildland fire conference is happening in Portugal next year. Have a quick look at this slide and a short video, A Path to Recovery and Well-being, Forest Restoration, just to set us up for the launch of the role of forest and landscape restoration in climate action. So you've got the slide there. When we take steps to restore a forest, we play a part in something much bigger. We're making a better world for our health and for the health of future generations. By replanting and managing our forests sustainably, we create new spaces where plants and animals can thrive. We promote economic activity that brings work and improves lives. We make a real impact on climate change. We improve the quality of the air we breathe, the food we eat and water we drink. We create a healthy environment for our children to grow. It's never too late to take action. Let's restore our forests and create a better future. There we go, wonderful, great stuff. So working together to manage fires for climates and people and remember the next International Wildland Fire Conference is in Portugal next year. Now, let me invite Lucy Garrett, finance specialist for forests. Another money person for forests and landscape restoration at the Forestry Division of Faw. Lucy, you're going to launch this publication, the key role of forest and landscape restoration in climate action. Over to you. Thank you very much, Henry. I'm very happy to launch this publication today. It's been a collaborative publication across FAO. Forest and Landscape Restoration is a relatively recent response to the impacts of forest and landscape degradation. But it aims to recover ecological functionality and enhance human wellbeing and is also a vital response to climate change impacts. So feeds very well following on from these discussions earlier on. There's an urgent need to protect and build carbon sinks through halting deforestation the social and ecological resilience of landscapes need to be strengthened. So forest and landscape restoration, FLR, is one natural climate pathway and forest and landscape restored ecosystems, forest ecosystems have the potential to remove and store approximately 12 billion tonnes of carbon. So provides a huge opportunity to better indicate, integrate tangible restoration aligned targets and provides an alternative to business as usual with more sustainable land management practices. So the climate change agenda has also recognised the importance of FLR in both mitigation and adaptation outcomes with the UNFCCC COP26 Glasgow leaders declaration on forest and land use. Also the COP26 global finance forest finance pledge, the 6th IPCC report and also the UN decade on ecosystem restoration and is developing various initiatives So given this timing this policy paper has aimed to illustrate the actual and potential role of FLR in climate action but it's also examined strategies to integrate FLR into climate change initiatives and to propose recommendations to greater enable climate change synergies between FLR and climate change programmes. So the papers highlighted that there are diverse impacts from different FLR interventions that can have diverse outcomes for mitigation and adaptation. It emphasises a key role that FLR can play to avoid carbon emissions and protect existing carbon sinks but also to build those sinks and enrich biodiversity on the ground. It can also reduce emissions through improved sustainable land management practices. And then another key role of FLR has been to identify its ability to improve and build both environmental and social resilience through things like improved soil fertility, local climate cooling and engagement with indigenous peoples and local community and sustainable value chain development. There were multiple and diverse mechanisms that we identified in the paper to how to integrate FLR process into climate change outcomes. So these included identifying priorities and indicators to restore carbon change ecosystems such as Peatlands, mainstreaming FLR into nationally determined NDCs to integrate FLR align targets and this would be to increase and foster synergies and improve coordination across intersectoral plans and policies which I think integrated fire management was also one of the key elements from the discussions earlier. It also identified key elements of climate risk screening and risk management through Jeff projects to address climate specific risks in the development of restoration design and implementation on the ground. Also realising adaptation benefits through restoration projects funded by climate funds such as the adaptation fund and GCF and also identified how important it was to secure land tenure and enable engagement with and participation of indigenous people and local communities. It also illustrated how FLR can support the delivery of multiple co-benefits to meet aligned targets with SDG agenda to simultaneously enhance adaptive capacity on the ground and resilience of people and ecosystems to not only deliver climate change adaptation but also mitigation as well. So key messages that came out of the paper that both climate change and restoration are inextricably linked together and that climate change is accelerating the degradation of forest and landscapes but is also a huge and can also be a huge source of emissions. So restored landscapes will therefore have a huge role increasing the impacts resilience to the impacts of climate change. It also identified these multiple synergies and opportunities to align both restoration objectives and climate change commitments to enhance actions on the ground and to meet these pledges and global goals. This included better integration within climate finance opportunity with transparent and accessible climate finance opportunities. Greater investment and support to integrate more restoration aligned targets within NDCs and also improved engagement with indigenous people and local communities throughout the FLR process. It emphasised the importance of monitoring, reporting and verification and the use of diverse tools, a lot of tools that we have within here in FAO to identify priority restoration biomes but also to monitor impact and change adaptation processes and it has the potential to contribute to wider global goals. This paper, we are launching it today unfortunately due to a few issues out of our hand. The paper is not available today but should be available either next week or the following week. So we invite you to either keep an eye on the forest and landscape restoration page to see when it will be launched or please get in contact with me and I'll be happy to send you a copy. So thank you very much. Thank you so much and Henry has already run to the plenary for the high level panel that will be starting in a minute. Big thanks to those of you who stuck to the end. Please read the paper. It's fantastic and we look forward to working with all of you on integrated fire management including the recovery restoration phase. Thank you.


The world watched in shock, yet again as Israeli troops withdrew after a long siege from Al-Shifa Hospital on April 1st. The death toll was catastrophic. Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that hundreds of bodies of civilians were found at different corners of the hospital building by Gaza authorities following the withdrawal. A large number of bodies were even found burnt and decomposed. This is the latest instance of Israel's very calculated attack on health facilities and those seeking shelter in them. We go to Abdul for more on this situation there. Abdul, thank you so much for joining us. Very horrifying scenes that came out in the media yesterday showing the extent of the Israeli slaughter that took place, the carnage that took place. Could you maybe give us some more details as to what happened? What was the siege for according to Israel and what kind of toll it has taken on Palestinians? Well Prashant, as usual Israel has used the excuse of Hamas taking shelter in various places, various civilian establishments including the hospitals and has attacked in the last six months. If you see all hospitals inside Gaza and Al-Shifa in fact has been attacked several times in the past using the same excuse that has been used by Hamas to launch attacks on Israel, has been a center for Hamas's operations and so on and so forth. So that there was nothing new here apart from the fact that unlike the in the earlier situations where they came they attacked and in few hours or something they left the premises there. They came on March 18. They took over control of the hospital premises where apart from the more than 100 patients there were hundreds others who were taking shelter because as we all know since the war began our hospitals have been used by the Palestinians as a shelter home considering that they will not come under attack but Israel forces March 10 on March 18 and till April 1st they basically completely destroyed the building, burnt it. They basically dug out in fact the symmetry which was created to bury some of the people who died during the seas earlier raids and so on and so forth on the hospitals and on the nearby areas and also killed some of the Palestinians who were taking shelter inside. So all the destruction was visible, one could only see it once they left the premises on Monday and that has basically exposed the level of devastation which has been caused by the Israelis inside the al-Shifa hospitals. The images are there in the public domain for people to see. Right Abdul, what is the kind of response been to this incident like you said even by Israeli standards this has been a shocking siege? Well Prashant if you see Israel has been again have completely denied that they have killed any Palestinian citizens. They claim that whoever was killed inside the hospital for 14 days they were all Hamas operatives of course without providing any evidence and this claim has been completely refuted by the Palestinians including Hamas which has said that none of those people were killed were Hamas operatives. Most of the people were those who were taking shelter and not only in al-Shifa hospital by the way people from the nearby buildings were also brought in and shot dead inside the hospital by the Israeli forces these are the allegations. Of course then if you see World Health Organization has said that the patients were killed and of course this has not happened several other times in the past and of course they have condemned but beyond that there has nothing more has happened. There are eyewitnesses from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society who have claimed that most of the people who are basically the bodies were found inside the hospital where civilians or the people who were dug up from the cemetery from the from inside the hospital and there has been a widespread condemnation and there has been calls for action against Israel that has been this basically proves that how Israel is carrying out genocide inside Gaza. All those reactions have come from across the world apart from the fact that of course the close Israel allies like US have reiterated their standard reactions which basically is to investigate what has happened and of course they don't care after a point that such atrocities are being committed without any action taking against Israel. In fact you see even on Tuesday Israel carried out an attack on the aid workers killing seven of them most of them are foreign nationals and nothing so far has happened on that as well. So it seems that Israel has complete impunity as if now. Continuing impunity of course and Abdul also finally wanted to get your views also on the fact that in addition to all these atrocities Israel also clearly deciding to target media organizations which cover these atrocities the latest bill regarding Al Jazeera the character on Al Jazeera as one example could you tell us a bit about that also. Well that is another way of kind of Israel kind of trying to shutting down whatever little information which is coming out from the region from Gaza and from of course the other occupied Palestinian territories where their forces are directly involved in committing humanitarian violations committing war crimes and genocide elect and and the new law basically gives the Israeli government power to shut down Al Jazeera in particular because that was the only major channel which was which had a local base which has correspondence in the region which were reporting on the daily basis what was happening. So aliasing Al Jazeera to basically kind of collaborating with Hamas calling it a terrorist organization the bill basically gives Netanyahu government power to shut it down to seize all its equipment and basically shut down its website as well. So that is the law which of course it says it is a temporary law but we know the history of Israel has been all these laws have been temporary but we'd have been renewed several times in the past. So it says that this law will be valid till July 31st but of course there is a provision to renew it. It basically if it is implemented and as I said before Netanyahu has already claimed that it will be implemented as soon as possible it would mean that the Al Jazeera will have to withdraw all its offices and equipment from the country and that would mean a significant shutting down of the flow of information. So what will have less information to kind of know that what is what Israel is exactly doing inside of course inside Gaza and other occupied territories. Thank you so much for the update but do stay back we'll come back to you for the next story. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suffered a major defeat when opposition parties won the local body polls in key cities including Istanbul and Ankara. The contest in Istanbul was keenly watched as Erdogan and his AKP party pulled all stops to regain the city from the incumbent mayor Ikram Imamoglu but failed miserably. What does this defeat mean for Erdogan and Turkey? We go back to Abdul. Welcome back Abdul. Very interesting election results from across Turkey. We know that I believe last year Erdogan won the elections it was quite a decisive victory and we see that within this time period has the pendulum really shifted. How do you sort of see these results? Well Prashant these are local body elections of course despite the fact that the elections were held all across the country and all the major urban centers in particular went for elections and it seems that a large part of them of course not the majority but where the major urban centers are located where the majority of the Turkish people live all those regions have seen the victory of opposition Republican people's party candidates. In fact in Istanbul which is the largest city in the country Imamoglu is basically has won with more than a million votes margin against AKPs the ruling party's candidate and similar things were repeated in Ankara in other cities major cities and that shows as you rightly pointed out that there is a shift from AKPs to the opposition particularly because there are reasons of course which are cited one of the main reasons is though it has been less than a year since Erdogan won the last elections and with of course not great margin but still significant margin that he has failed his government has failed to deliver on the promises which he made when he was contesting as he was campaigning for his election and those were related to the massive inflation which has led to the rise of the prices of essential commodity to a level which has not nobody no country has seen for a very long time and the inflation is still running above 50% in the last few months so the failure to curb the inflation and the failure to deliver on the other major issues has basically led to you can say shift of as a part of AKPs voters to the Republican party and that basically is shown in the election and if this trend continues for the next few years AKP would be in danger given the fact that as I said before these are the major population centers where you can say majority of the Turkish population lives and that has voted decisively against in fact in Ankara again the voting winning margin is huge more than 20-25% so that shows that the majority of the people in urban Turkey has shifted away from AKP primarily because it has failed to deliver on the major issues it's not to mention this is at least Erdogan's last term unless he decides to play with the constitution or effect some kind of proxy power change well analysts were speculating that if AKP is able to win a part of these cities majority of these cities Erdogan might would have gone to kind of amend the constitution and have another term for himself because he's only 70 and given the fact that there is a trend at the global level where people with older age are contesting elections and winning it may have would have been the possibility but now given the fact that the as I said before the decisive victory for the Republican party would mean Republicans people's party would mean that Erdogan is not sure whether he will if he contests again will win the elections and maybe as during the campaign for the city for Istanbul elections in particular he said that this would be my last election it seems that that is going to be the fact till he is at comments in 2028 but Abdul thank you so much for that update and that's all we have in today's DLD brief we'll be back with a fresh episode tomorrow meanwhile do visit our website peoplesdispatch.org follow us on all the social media platforms and if you're watching this on YouTube please hit the subscribe button


Behind me is one of Purdue's most recognizable structures, the bell tower. We actually celebrated the bell tower's 25th anniversary, just last semester, and it has a pretty rich and full history here on Purdue's campus. One of the rumors that surrounds it is that if you kiss the love of your life under the bell tower at the stroke of midnight, you'll be together forever. But there's another myth that's maybe not quite so friendly. Wait, Pete, hadn't you heard? If you step under the bell tower on the seal, you're not going to graduate within four years.


Surprise is ahead! It's doomed! Ukrainian security service comments on Crimean Bridge future. Ukraine managed to strike the Crimean Bridge twice in October 2022 and in July 2023. Thanks to engineers and military personnel, Ukraine will continue to target the bridge's structures, reveals the head of the security service of Ukraine, Vasyl Malyuk. This is a real slap in the face to Putin. It's a new milestone in the history of naval forces. As soon as they started building it, we already understood that in case of a full-scale invasion, it would be the main logistical artery for the enemy. Indeed, that's what happened. The enemy troops in southern Ukraine are being supplied via the Crimean Bridge, said Malyuk. The destruction of the Crimean Bridge restricted Russia's transportation of military equipment and fuel to the captured territories in the south. This is a legitimate target. According to the norms of the Geneva Conventions, other norms of international law, existing legislation or traditions of warfare, this is a legitimate target because it's an illegal construction on Ukrainian territory. Malyuk explained, according to the security service of Ukraine, video and photos of Russians themselves, which they posted on their social media, were used to prepare attacks on the Crimean Bridge. For one of the strikes, a video of a Russian woman filming her vacation on a yacht was used, showing the lower structures of the bridge. That's why the decision was made to create the Sea Baby Maritime Drones. There will be many more surprises ahead, not just concerning the Crimean Bridge. The bridge is doomed, Malyuk stated.