Forest conservation summit kicks off in Gabon

Gabon's One Forest Summit kicked off in Libreville Wednesday (Mar. 1st).

The meeting aims to bring countries with large forest areas to collaboratively develop a platform of scientific and economic solutions; to combine forest consevation and economic development.

"My main objective is to form the nucleus" of a team, "a group of heads of state who will go on the world stage to fight for these issues of forest conservation," Lee White, Gabon's Minister of Forests, Oceans, Environment and Climate Change said.

As a host region, the Congo Basin aspires to increase the wealth produced while keeping low the ecological footprint of human activities. 

The main challenge for Central African countries is to reconcile the insterests and needs of current generations with those of future generations.

"We must be able to reconcile inclusive development within the framework of a circular economy because we have our populations to whom we must give alternative resources, to whom we must teach how to use these natural resources without putting ourselves, human beings, in difficult position," the Congolese minister for Environment Arlette Soudan-Nonault, said.

The Summit will discuss innovative financing solutions for forest conservation and payments for ecosystem services, with a focus on premium carbon credits and the issue of human-wildlife conflict.

"We have to find the right balance. For us, it is not only a matter establishing norms, but of doing so while bearing in mind that that alongside forest areas, human beings live and develop."

"Humans who evolve. And that we cannot talk about environmental spaces without talking about the evolution of populations," Gabonese MP Angélique Ngoma said.

The second and final day of the forum will be devoted to the high-level meeting of heads of state and government on the problems that African, Amazonian and Asian tropical forest basins face.