The International Tropical Timber Organisation and the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity have renewed their longstanding collaboration through to 2029, extending a partnership dating to 2010 that now coordinates joint delivery against the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the upcoming UN Decade on Afforestation and Reforestation. That is according to ITTO Executive Director Sheam Satkuru, who signed the new four-year memorandum of understanding alongside CBD Executive Secretary Astrid Schomaker on the margins of the 21st session of the UN Forum on Forests in New York on 12 May.
Wood Central understands that the renewed MoU is the fourth instrument signed between the two institutions in 15 years, following the original 2010 agreement, signed in the lead-up to the CBD Conference of the Parties in Nagoya, and the most recent predecessor, which ran from 2021 through 2025. That 2010 instrument also established the ITTO/CBD Collaborative Initiative for Tropical Forest Biodiversity, which has since delivered transboundary protected-area projects across South-East Asia and Latin America, with Japan the primary donor.
Speaking at the New York signing, Schomaker linked ITTO’s decades of work on sustainable tropical forest management directly to the delivery of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the global biodiversity agreement adopted at CBD COP15 in Montreal in December 2022. “This expertise is crucial for the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework,” Schomaker said.
For Satkuru, whose term as Executive Director was extended to January 2028 at the 60th session of the International Tropical Timber Council in Yokohama in December 2024, the renewal locks in institutional continuity through to the 2030 deadline for the Global Biodiversity Framework. “I look forward to the next years of working together,” Satkuru said.
Joint delivery under the renewed MoU will run across the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the CBD Forest Biodiversity Programme of Work, the UN Decade on Afforestation and Reforestation spanning 2027 to 2036, and the Global Forest Goals adopted under the UN Strategic Plan for Forests. Tropical forests cover 1.84 billion hectares, or 45 per cent of all forests globally, with ITTO’s producer and consumer member countries accounting for the bulk of tropical timber traded internationally.
It comes as UNFF21 has produced a series of tropical forest commitments in New York this week, including a Korean proposal for an International Day of Sustainable Wood co-hosted by ITTO, with Satkuru and Schomaker now taking the renewed MoU through to the 2030 deadline universally agreed for the Global Biodiversity Framework’s targets.
