Sandra Valenzuela, Director of WWF Colombia: After©more than a day©, great lessons have been learned. The second phase shows the willingness of several actors to join forces to promote the trade in legally extracted timber. The bet is that it is an improved and renewed pact with concrete, achievable and measurable objectives that promotes articulated work for the sustainable use of forests. Phase 2.0 of the 2030 Pact reinforces this objective: “Promotion of the legal timber market in Colombia”, with a strong institutional articulation that improves forest management. Johnny Ariza Milanós©, European Union Coordinator for Cooperation, Rural Development and Environment in Colombia: “Since its creation, the Pact has been one of the axes of the FLEGT Action Plan in Colombia. The new EU regulation on the import of products related to deforestation and forest degradation (in the approval phase) proposes an approach to timber production and marketing that, in addition to ensuring legality, also represents its environmental sustainability as a central axis. This will be one of the challenges of the new phase of the pact. From day one©, the Compact focused on the timber trade and mobilized 69 entities against illegal logging and illegal trade: that the timber extracted, transported, traded and used was of legal origin. For Sandra Valenzuela, director of WWF Colombia, the new version of this initiative contributes to the country`s goals, including reducing deforestation, adaptation, legality, the climate agenda, economic reactivation and strengthening community participation in the regions. “Two of Colombia`s commitments by 2030 are to reduce deforestation to zero and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 51%. The pact is a sum of public, private and civil society wills. We are committed to ensuring that the wood extracted, transported, marketed and used comes exclusively from legal sources. All this is part of the instruments we are creating, such as the Climate Protection Act, to take decisive action against deforestation, among other things.
In this, we have and will be very clear: Colombia`s natural resources are respected! and, with the help of communities, we will continue to protect them,” said Carlos Eduardo Correa, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development. “The pact is consolidated in a strategy to strengthen legality and combat the illegal timber trade in Colombia. From the Ministry of Environment, we are working decisively to promote legal timber through the diversified use of forests, where the pact will create tools for monitoring, control and monitoring, as well as strategies in areas that strengthen social incentives for communities to maintain forest sustainability,” explained Santa. In this context, the Director of Forests and Ecosystem Services of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, Adriana Santa, said that Phase 2.0 of the pact will also advance plans and instruments that promote forest sustainability and strengthen inter-institutional articulation that will consolidate community governance in the country. With the aim of promoting the legality of timber in Colombia, phase 2.0 of the Pact includes the development of technical and financial training measures for the various actors related to the supply and promotion of the use of legal timber, as well as the establishment and implementation of a monitoring system. Guillermo Navarro, FAO Forester for Latin America©and the Caribbean of the FAO EU FLEGT Programme: “The issues have been positioned at the highest political level, recognized and integrated into instruments such as the National Development Plan, which recognizes the fight against illegal logging as a state policy and the Pact as a tool to improve forest policy.”