For ensuring biodiversity conservation and livelihood improvement in sustainably managed tropical forests through landscape restoration and expansion of natural protected areas, the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have renewed their longstanding collaboration for another five years.
With the aim of supporting CBD parties, including India, and ITTO member countries in the tropics in their efforts to conserve biodiversity, the collaboration will implement sustainable forest management, restore degraded forest landscapes, and encourage the sustainable use of forest resources.
The collaboration to 2025 was formalised with the signing last week of a memorandum of understanding (MoU).
The ITTO and the CBD have been collaborating closely for a decade. The first MoU between the two bodies, signed in 2010 in the framework of the International Year of Biodiversity, gave birth to the ITTO-CBD Collaborative Initiative for Tropical Forest Biodiversity.
To date, the collaborative Initiative has encompassed 16 projects in 23 tropical countries, all of which had experienced biodiversity losses and decline in the forest area and have large numbers of forest-dependent people. At $13 million, the total budget of the 16 projects is modest, but a recent technical review found that they have achieved extraordinary success in improving local livelihoods and forest management, restoring degraded forest landscapes and conserving biodiversity.