Keynote speakers

Sally Aitken

Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, Canada

Theme 3 (Fri) Forest biodiversity and its ecosystem services

Title  Valuing diversity in uncertain times

Summary With unprecedented rates of climate change and uncertainty around future abiotic and abiotic conditions, species and seed-source decisions for reforestation are challenging. At the same time, we are counting on healthy managed forests to provide carbon sequestration, habitat for biodiversity, and a multitude of other ecosystem services. New approaches informing forest management and conservation decision-making will be discussed that integrate climate, species distribution, and genetic models.

Biosketch Sally Aitken is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. Her research integrates phenotypic, genomic and climatic data to understand the processes driving local adaptation to climate in trees.

She has led two multi-institutional large-scale applied research projects, AdapTree and CoAdapTree, focussed on developing genomic approaches and tools to guide reforestation, restoration and breeding for new climates. She co-authored the textbook Conservation and the Genomics of Populations (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Dr. Aitken received the Canadian Forestry Scientific Achievement Award in 2009, the International Union of Forest Research Organization’s Scientific Achievement Award in 2014, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017.

Listen to Sally in the IUFRO podcast “Branching out”

Fran Raymond Price

Global Forest Practice Leader, WWF International

Theme 3 (Fri) Forest biodiversity and its ecosystem services

Title Bending the Curve on Forest and Biodiversity Loss

Summary Fran Raymond Price will talk about the current state of forests and biodiversity . She will lay out WWF’s strategic pathways, or ‘forest gamechangers’: key levers that can enable systemic shifts, address the drivers of biodiversity loss, and help move towards green, just economies. She will underscore the imperative of collective action at all levels, including the urgent need to harness the power of science in new ways to bend the curve towards forest and nature positive.

Biosketch Fran Raymond Price has spent her career working to protect forests and improve forestry around the globe. She joined the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in June 2020 after 18 years at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), where she helped guide the organization’s adoption and promotion of responsible forest management and certification.

Before joining TNC, Fran directed the Forest Monitoring Project, hosted by the Izaak Walton League of America, where she evaluated forest practices on industry lands throughout the U.S. Prior to this she helped coordinate philanthropic investments in forests and renewable energy at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Fran has served on several boards and task groups, including the FSC International Board; the Tropical Forest Foundation board; High Conservation Value Resource Network Steering Group; and WWF’s North American Forest and Trade Network Advisory Group.

Fran holds a master’s degree in forestry from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a B.A. in History and Government from Cornell University. She began her forestry career as a Peace Corps community forestry volunteer in the Dominican Republic.

Harini Nagendra

Director and Professor, Research Centre and Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability, Azim Premji University, India

Theme 4 (Mon) Forests for sustainable societies

Title of presentation Thinking ecologically about cities in the Global South

Summary Cities in the Global South are on a breakneck path to growth. With climate change impacting these dense, fast growing urban settlements, we need to critically understand the importance of urban forestry in historical and contemporary times, to re-design cities to accommodate ecology, ensuring human wellbeing as well as resilience to climate change.

Biosketch Harini Nagendra is Director of the Azim Premji University Research Center and leads the University’s Center for Climate Change and Sustainability. Over the past 30 years, Professor Nagendra has been at the leading edge of research examining conservation in forests and cities of South Asia from the perspective of both landscape ecology and social justice.

For her interdisciplinary research and practice, she has received several awards including the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award.

Professor Nagendra was a Lead Author of the IPCC AR5 reports, and a Science Committee member of DIVERSITAS and the Global Land Programme. She engages with international science and policy through her involvement as a Steering Committee member of the Future Earth Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society, and the Future Earth Urban Knowledge Advisory Network. She is on the Advisory Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Climate-KIC and the WRI Ross Centre for Sustainable Cities.

Cécile Ndjebet

Founder of the African Women’s Network for Community Management of Forests

Theme 4 (Mon) Forests for sustainable societies

Title of presentation The Risk of Women’s Exclusion to Sustainable Societies

Summary Women are known as key actors in the use and management of forest resources, through their socio-cultural role as providers of food for the household, and as key actors in the value chains of fuelwood and non-timber forest products. In Africa, women and girls make up more than 50% of the rural agricultural workforce, but their rights to property and inheritance at the community level are generally extremely low (RRI, Power and Potential, 2017).

¹In 2016, the Intergovernmental Economic Organisation (OECD) found that the nearly US $10 billion was earmarked for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) fighting for gender justice. Yet, just 8% of these funds reached CSOs working in developing countries, and only a fraction reportedly went to grassroots women’s rights organizations directly. It is reported that Indigenous women’s organizations received only 0.7% of all recorded human rights funding between 2010 and 2013 despite them using, managing, and conserving community territories that comprise over 50% of the world’s land and supporting up to 2.5 billion people. Where resources are reaching Indigenous women’s organizations, they are typically small-scale and short-term.

Global and regional studies addressing women’s access to this funding are lacking, and data is virtually non-existent for Afro-descendant and local community women’s organizations in the Global South specifically, painting a bleak picture in terms of funding for women’s grassroots organizations overall.

The exclusion of women from decision making and implementation of sustainable forest management and nature-based solutions to climate change is widespread and limiting impact of these initiatives. This presents risks to the sustainability of forest and climate investments, given the key roles that women play in forest and landscape management.

Biosketch Cécile Ndjebet is an Agronomist and Social Forester by profession; she is one of the well-known leaders of CSO in Africa, an international women’s rights advocate and gender specialist. Cécile has been devoted to women’s rights issues for the past 25 years.

Cécile is a member of a good number of networks and professional societies at national, regional and global levels.

In September 2000, she co-founded Cameroon Ecology, a local NGO to promote community forestry; In May 2009, she co-founded REFACOF, a Sub-Sahara women’s Platform of the forest sector.

Cécile is COMIFAC Climate Change Champion, Wangari Maathaï Forests Champion, UNEP Champion of the Earth and Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity 2023 Winner.

Photo: PIK/Krakow, 2020

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

Professor

Theme 5 (Sat) Forests for the future

Title Forest Transformation 4 Climate Restoration

Summary Recent evidence indicates that ‘climate overshoot’ will happen in the second half of the 21st century. For limiting the associated negative impacts negative emissions will be needed as well. One promising nature-based approach in this context is turning harvested forest biomass into long-lasting elements of the built environment. But are there appropriate ways of sustainable forest management that preserve key ecosystems functions of forests and yield sufficient organic building materials?

Biosketch Hans Joachim (’John’) Schellnhuber studied physics and mathematics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he also completed his doctorate in quantum physics. Following a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara, he held full professorships at the Universities of Oldenburg and Potsdam, as well as at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

As the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Schellnhuber led the institute from 1992 to 2018. He also served as research director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Great Britain from 2001 to 2005. He is the founder and managing director of Bauhaus Erde and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University (Beijing). In December 2023 Schellnhuber became Director General of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria.

Throughout his career, Schellnhuber has received several notable awards and recognitions. In 2022, he was awarded the Honorary Edition of the German Sustainability Prize for his “enormous influence on science, politics, and business by developing and communicating sustainable solutions to the global environmental crisis”.

Isabelle Claire Dela Paz

President of the International Forestry Students Association (IFSA)

Theme 5 (Sat) Forests for the future

Title of presentation From Classroom to Canopy: Enriching Forestry Education of Secondary School Students through the School Forest Project and IFSA TreE-Learning

Summary Forestry education is often not adequately integrated into school curricula, leading to a limited understanding of forest ecosystems and sustainable forest management among secondary school students. Together with the Forests for Tomorrow (Stiftung Wälder für Morgen) and Gymnasium Carolinum Neustrelitz, IFSA is taking part in the “School Forest Project” to integrate TreE-Learning forestry-related modules in secondary school curricula in Northern Germany and evaluate its effectiveness in influencing the students’ perception, knowledge, and behavior towards forestry and natural resources management.

Biosketch Isabelle Dela Paz is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Bachelor of Science in Forestry at the University of the Philippines, Los Baños (UPLB) with a specialization in Urban Forestry, and a former Merit scholar by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).

Currently, Isabelle works as a Communication Associate in CIFOR-ICRAF for the “Sustainable Farming in Tropical Asian Landscapes” Project. She serves as the President of the International Forestry Students’ Association (IFSA), an international network of forestry students where she had 2 years of prior service as the Internal Councilor.

In 2021, Isabelle was the Vice President of the Association of Filipino Forestry Students – UPLB (AFFS-UPLB), a duly recognized academic-environmental organization in the Philippines.