Sustainable forest management (SFM) is key to protecting essential ecosystem services, supporting rural livelihoods, and achieving international climate objectives. Well-managed forests can significantly contribute to climate action by increasing carbon sequestration and enhancing ecosystem resilience. However, afforestation and deforestation trends are influenced by a complex interplay of economic, policy, and environmental drivers. This session will discuss the role of forests for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and balancing demand for forest resources and climate and biodiversity objectives. It will explore key policy instruments, including regulatory frameworks, economic instruments and voluntary initiatives that promote SFM. Discussions will also highlight differences in the management of private and public forests, as well as the role of corporate strategies in fostering sustainable practices.

Agriculture is both a major contributor to climate change and one of the sectors most vulnerable to its impacts. Agricultural production (including emissions from land use change due to agricultural expansion) contributes to around one-fifth of the global GHG emissions. In turn, climate change poses challenges for agriculture due to rising temperature, more frequent and intense extreme weather events, and variations in rainfall patterns, among others. Agriculture is also a major consumer of fresh water globally and is closely linked with global biodiversity loss, including through deforestation. This session will explore what can be done to make agriculture productive, sustainable, and resilient, including through sustainable productivity growth and the adoption of e.g. regenerative practices, agroforestry (e.g. integration of trees into crop and animal farming systems) and nature-based solutions. The session will also address the role of innovation (e.g. smart technologies to enhance predictability, additives to reduce methane emissions, etc.) and increased productivity to reduce emissions, and the role of policies to address climate change and other environmental objectives.

Transparent and internationally agreed methods to measure greenhouse gas emissions and removals are essential for effective climate policymaking. However, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of GHG emissions and removals from the AFOLU sector, for example through afforestation and de-forestation, conversion and other land-use change processes, presents numerous challenges. Sound MRV requires assessing an array of interacting processes, both natural and anthropogenic, which can be widely dispersed in space and highly variable in time. Uncertainties over the impacts of future climate change (including potential feedback effects from climate system tipping points) complicates the assessment of forest GHG removals. Interactions between agricultural inputs (e.g. fertilisers) and byproducts with soils and the atmosphere also create measurement challenges. In other cases, multiple methods exist and can give different results, creating confusion. This session will discuss key challenges and possible solutions to improve GHG estimations in the AFOLU sector. What is the role of satellite imagery to map the implications of land-use change? How to evaluate the impacts of wildfires and other extreme weather event on AFOLU GHG emissions and stocks? How to create greater alignment around which methods are most appropriate in which contexts? The session will also discuss best practices for aligning approaches and facilitating knowledge exchange across countries, including filling knowledge gaps in developing countries.

As the world gears up for COP30 in Belem, how to scale-up finance for and investment in forests and nature has become a core focus of climate policy discussions. Forests provide several ecosystem services that are largely unpriced (e.g. carbon storage and sequestration, biodiversity conservation, protection of soils and water quality). As a result, investments that enhance and protect forests are at a disadvantage compared to investments that put these benefits at risk. While a wide range of tools have been developed in recent years in order to better price these positive externalities (e.g. REDD+ payments and carbon credits for climate action and payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity offsets etc.), several challenges to their scale-up remain. This session will explore the challenges, best practises and innovative financing instruments in mobilising finance for sustainable forest management through better pricing of their climate mitigation impact. The session will examine the viability of different instruments and their specific challenges, such as assessing the integrity, effectiveness and additionality of actions promoted through such instruments, and ensuring the permanence of such impacts.

Forestry is a critical driver of both economic growth and climate change mitigation, yet its complex interconnections with rural development remain underexplored. While sustainable forest management (SFM) has been widely studied in relation to biodiversity and climate change, the spatial and territorial dimensions of forestry highlight unique challenges and opportunities. This session will delve into the diverse roles of forestry across geographic contexts—from urban forests serving recreational and environmental purposes to remote rural forests contributing to the bioeconomy and ecotourism. The discussions will examine forestry’s multidimensional contributions to economic, social, and environmental well-being and explore the spatial concentration of forests, the role of place-based approaches in balancing trade-offs, and the integration of forestry with broader rural development objectives.