The One Forest Summit, a summit for the future of forest ecosystems
Announced by the President of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron and his Gabonese counterpart Ali Bongo during the COP27, the 6th edition of the One Planet Summit will be held on March 1st and 2nd, 2023, in Libreville, Gabon. Renamed One Forest Summit, this edition is dedicated to the protection and sustainable management of tropical forest basins (Congo, Amazon, Southeast Asia). The event will bring together members of governments, civil society and experts. Startups and specialized companies have been selected to present their innovations and concrete projects in favor of forest preservation or reforestation.
The first day of the Summit will bring together members of government and civil society as well as experts to help achieve the goals of the One Forest Summit. Participants will also have the opportunity to take part in ministerial and side events. On the second day, meetings will be held with heads of state and government on the Congo Basin and the common challenges facing the forest basins of Africa, the Amazon and Asia.
Our ClimateTech will be present at the One Forest Summit to advance cooperation among stakeholders
Amongthe companies invited to this summit is our ClimateTech MORFO, which has designed a unique method reforestation of degraded ecosystems on a large scale, using drones. By combining microbiology, drone technology and AI, MORFO offers a faster, more sustainable and less expensive reforestation model. Our projects in Brazil, French Guyana and Gabon - the host country of this summit - have attracted the attention of experts and led the French delegation to invite Adrien Pages (CEO and co-founder of MORFO) and Cedric Mba Allogo (Director of Sales and Operations in Africa). Our desire is to actively participate in the debates and to support the commitments in favor of biodiversity, in close collaboration with all the actors present, governments, public and private actors.
In particular, all stakeholders will be invited to work on three areas:
- Scientific cooperation on forest ecosystems to strengthen international expertise on the links between health and biodiversity.
- Creation of sustainable value chains in the forestry sector to ensure that activities benefit the economy, the environment and local populations.
- Search for innovative financing for biodiversity to improve the quantity and quality of funding for tropical forest conservation.
MORFO calls for the acceleration of reforestation processes
The One Forest Summit is an opportunity to recall that this decade 2020-2030 must allow us to quickly recover native forests by restoring a maximum of ecosystems. To achieve the climate objectives that France, Europe and the world have set for 2030, 35% of the carbon removal potential should come from forests according to the IPCC. The UN hopes to reforest 80 million hectares per year. Today, we are only at 8 million hectares per year. A clear acceleration of the reforestation process is necessary. But this acceleration will only be possible thanks to the collaboration between all the actors of the reforestation chain.
In this respect, we hope that our second research collaboration with the UMR LSTM (IRD/CIRAD/INRAE) named VEGEDRONE II could be an example of fruitful collaboration between laboratories and private companies. We also hope that the debates will have a global scope, and will associate technological solutions and local actions, rather than opposing them. As a reminder, in a recent study published in BioScience, Sara Löfqvist and her colleagues from ETH Zurich revealed that the effectiveness of ecosystem restoration projects can be improved by taking into account social and equity issues.
Finally, we would like this summit to be a place for reflection and progress on the issue of carbon credits, a system that is still largely perfectible. It is up to all of us, technological actors, researchers, members of civil society and political actors to collaborate and move forward together with a common objective.
