President Chirac,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies & Gentlemen

I’m going to start my presentation today with some numbers, numbers that will I hope set the context for the discussion and place in sharp focus why we urgently need to act to protect the world’s remaining forests.
This is the level – 450 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere – that scientists say we must stay below if we’re to keep global warming to less than 2 oC. They say that any increase above 2oC will be catastrophic for the planet, not to mention the global economy and all the world’s people.
Right now, we’re at 395 ppm and so we’re below 450. That’s good. What isn’t good is that this level is rising by 5ppm each year and at this rate, unless we take urgent action, we will surpass the 450 level in 12-15 years. That’s disturbing…

What’s even more disturbing is that at our current rate of green house gas emissions, we’re actually in a very concerning position. This graph shows three scenarios – a 2 degree, a 4 degree and a 6 degree warming. The world’s best scientific minds have put these models together to help us understand where we are and where we need to be. A 2 degree warming will, as I’ve already said, be catastrophic. At 6 degrees, the scientists forecast that there will no longer be any forests, and that there will no longer be any large mammals – none and that includes humans – and that the major life form on Earth will be insects.

At the moment, we’re here, which means that we’re heading in the wrong direction as far as the quality of life of our grand children and great grandchildren is concerned.

What we have to do – and quickly – is get ourselves to here. We must reduce our green house gas emissions as rapidly as possible and it is estimated that if we can reduce deforestation, particularly in the tropics which today contributes as much as 20% of total green house gas emissions, we will be able to capture 46% of all the reductions we need.

Thus Ladies & Gentlemen, protecting forests is crucially important.

How do we do this?

There is a lot of discussion and negotiation happening now as part of the international dialogue leading up to the Copenhagen meeting in December aimed at agreeing a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Everyone agrees that avoiding deforestation must be included in any new agreement yet there is no agreement whatsoever on how do this.

Whilst negotiations and discussions drag on, more and more forest goes up in smoke – we’re losing 13 million hectares every year – and this adds more and more carbon into the atmosphere, taking us up to the 450 limit.

This is where The Forest Trust or TFT comes in.

We can’t wait for global negotiators so we work with businesses to harness the power of the global market – it’s much faster – to make forests worth more as forests than as cleared land – we make them worth more alive than dead.

We help companies and their customers buy Forest Responsible Product. That means, products that do not destroy forests,  that are not linked to any environmental destruction or to any socially damaging practices.

For wood products, this means that products should be “FSC certified”.

An FSC certified product is one that has come from a forest that is sustainably managed in accordance with the FSC Principles & Criteria. The FSC – or Forest Stewardship Council – is an international standard setting organization backed by social and environmental NGOs and by the wood industry. Its Principles of Forest Stewardship comprise 56 criteria for sustainable forest management and a forest that is FSC certified is sustainably managed. Buying FSC certified wood products thus helps conserve forests.

So TFT is starting to work on this now too. Our aim is to help supermarkets to buy Forest Responsible Products so that we can create that market pull for Forest Responsible food products because it is these, much more than wood products that are driving forest destruction. We’re sure that our model can work here too and that by doing so and working with the world’s supermarkets, that we can get the carbon emissions from deforestation reduced.

To support this work TFT maintains a network of offices around the world. We have 90 staff operating from 14 offices and our focus is in the forests themselves – our staff work in forests and factories every day in the Congo Basin, in SE Asia and in the Amazon and we have staff across Europe, in the US and in China.

Half of our funding comes from our members and here in France we have over 20 member companies including large retailers like Leroy Merlin, Castorama and E. Leclerc.

The other half of our funding comes from donors like the European Union, the British government and from philanthropic Foundations like Fondation Chirac.

The generous support we receive from Fondation Chirac has enabled us to undertake more projects in the Congo Basin to support efforts to expand sustainable forest management by empowering indigenous Pygmy communities to have a voice in forest management decisions that impact their lives.

But we cannot do this in isolation.

We must have that market pull to make it financially viable for forest managers to manage their forests in a sustainable way. And that’s why this meeting today is very important because President Chirac has convened this discussion to help raise awareness here in France of the importance of buying Forest Responsible FSC certified wood products.

By doing so, the French government, French retailers and French consumers can each play their own role in conserving the world’s remaining forests and by doing so, can give us all a greater chance of keeping below that critical 450 ppm mark.

It’s a challenge we can ill afford to lose.

Thank you

Scott Poynton,
Directeur Exécutif du TFT