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Outline of agreement by World Bank
and WWF to conserve the world's forests

24 June 1997

WWF and the Bank have agreed to work jointly to escalate and bring better focus to international efforts to deal with the ecological, economic and social consequences of ongoing deforestation and forest degradation in the world;

WWF and the Bank will promote the establishment of an ecologically representative network of protected areas, covering at least 10 per cent of each of the world's forest types by the year 2000. In this context, the Bank has adopted a specific new target of the establishment of 50 million hectares of new forest protected areas in its client group of countries by 2005.

WWF and the Bank will co-operate to achieve the Bank's new target of the independent certification of 200 million hectares of well-managed production forests by 2005 - 100 million hectares in temperate and boreal forest regions, and 100 million hectares in tropical forest regions.

Four specific programmes of activity will be shared, as the main means of collaborating on this project:

1. Identification and establishment of forest protected areas: utilising WWF's field capability to define such areas; and the Bank's ability to invest in and develop new financial instruments to implement protection;

2. Independent certification of well-managed forests; private sector approaches: combined WWF/Bank initiatives on both the demand and the supply side of the international forest products market, aimed at promoting investment in, and purchase of, products from well-managed forests;

3. Integrating policies, programmes, and interest groups: utilising organisational networks and advantages to move forest countries beyond broad commitments to sustainability targets, towards geographically and technically specific forest management agreements;

4. New products and instruments: joint programmes to promote new approaches to forests, such as transition funds aimed at helping local communities to invest in sustainability, and compensatory mechanisms with the same objective.

The two organisations will work on refinement of their collaborative programme, along the line outlined above, and with attention to developing joint priorities for both the focus and nature of activities to be shared, and also geographical location of such activities.

At this juncture, it would seem that the Bank and WWF could work more intensively together on the Amazon, the Congo Basin, New Guinea, Russia, and China.

© WWF
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