Policy alignment for sustainable forest management with the CPF
Thursday, 2 October 2025
9:00-17:00 (UTC+2)
Gloria Hotel, Maputo, Mozambique
Exchange of experiences, best practices and tools
As part of the Dryland Sustainable Landscapes Southern Africa Workshop
Forests play an essential role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, support biodiversity, and sustain livelihoods. Yet, forest loss accounts for approximately 11 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The drivers of deforestation often originate outside the forest sector and are shaped by complex factors such as commodity production and land use changes. This underscores the urgent need for coherent, cross-sectoral policy frameworks that integrate the forest with related sectors, particularly agriculture. Such integrated approaches are essential to fulfilling global commitments to halt and reverse deforestation, and to achieving interconnected goals on forests, biodiversity, climate, and land.
Often, poor intersectoral coordination undermines progress toward sustainable forest management (SFM) and results in conflicting land use priorities, where economic development projects—including those in agriculture—drive deforestation and compromise efforts in climate action, biodiversity conservation, and land restoration. Without integrated planning and cross-sector collaboration, efforts towards sustainable forest management remain fragmented, weakly enforced, and ultimately ineffective.
While policy dialogues have acknowledged this challenge for several years, translating coordinated strategies into action on the ground remains difficult. Many countries have already expressed the need for targeted support to address policy gaps, overcome institutional silos and align national development strategies. Furthermore, the Rio Convention Secretariats have emphasized the need for greater alignment across their respective agendas, through improved policy and funding coherence and integration of synergies and trade-offs.
Objectives
The Policy Exchange Day aims to facilitate experience-sharing on policy tools and best practices that strengthen cross-sectoral collaboration for implementing SFM and achieving the UNSPF 2017–2030 and Global Forest Goals (GFGs). It will showcase successful policy integration examples (e.g. NBSAPs, LDN, NDCs), highlight innovations and mechanisms for mainstreaming SFM—especially in forestry-agriculture linkages—and identify both challenges and opportunities in embedding forest priorities into broader sectoral policies.
Background
The Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), a voluntary arrangement bringing together 16 international organizations and secretariats with substantial programs on forests, leverages the comparative advantages and technical expertise of its members to facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration, and supports improved, coherent policies for SFM and supports the UNFF.
Following the recommendations of UNFF19 and ECOSOC resolution 2024/15, one of the key actions identified in the 2024 mid-term review of the International Arrangement on Forests, of which the CPF is an integral part, is to strengthen the cooperation of national focal points of member organizations of the CPF to support country-level implementation on the ground.
In response to this request of ECOSOC, among other activities, the CPF organizes this Policy Exchange Day aimed at learning about policy tools and best practices to strengthen cross-sectoral collaboration and coordination in support of the implementation of SFM and achievement of the UNSPF 2017-30 and the GFGs.
To build on existing work and harness operational efficiencies, the workshop will be held in conjunction with the 3rd Regional Exchange Mechanism for Southern African countries, as part of the Sustainable Forest Management Impact Program on Dryland Sustainable Landscapes (DSL-IP), taking place from 29 September to 3 October 2025 in Maputo, Mozambique.
This event was made possible through the financial support of Canada.
