This fall, Rainforest Partnership returned to two major UN gatherings on biodiversity and climate. Our board chair, Niyanta Spelman, attended the UN Biodiversity Conference in Yerevan, Armenia, and is now at the UN Climate Change Conference in Antalya, Türkiye, with our senior advisor, Deb Tompkins.
For Rainforest Partnership, being part of these conversations again is an important step as we plan the next three years of our work. We go to listen, to understand how others are responding to the pressures facing forests, and to see where collaboration could make our work in Ecuador and Peru more effective.
In Yerevan, a wider view of biodiversity conservation
The October meeting in Yerevan was the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP17. It brought together governments, UN agencies, researchers, conservation organizations, and Indigenous leaders around a shared question: How can countries turn global biodiversity commitments into action and measure whether that action is making a difference?
What makes COP17 valuable is the chance to hear that question from several perspectives. Key organizations included the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), focused on turning global conservation commitments into measurable action, covering nearly 50 agenda items.
For us, those exchanges give us a chance to learn how others are using what they discover in the field to inform decisions about forest protection.
In Antalya, the focus turns to climate
COP31, which runs through November 20, is the annual conference under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its scope includes the transition to cleaner energy, how countries and communities adapt to climate impacts, and how that work is financed. Across these topics is a practical challenge: how to turn climate commitments into changes people can see and sustain.
The two conferences come at forest protection from different directions. In Yerevan, the starting point was the diversity of life a forest holds. In Antalya, the climate discussions give us a way to consider how forests store carbon and help communities cope with a changing climate. Those questions meet in places like Ecuador’s Napo region, where decisions about water, food, and livelihoods are bound up with the health of the surrounding forest. Hearing how people in other regions approach these issues gives us more to draw on as we work with our partners.
Bringing that perspective into our next three years
As we develop our next three-year strategic plan, we’ll bring what we hear in Yerevan and Antalya into conversations with our team and local partners. That wider perspective can help us decide what to pay closer attention to, where our experience is useful to others, and which relationships are worth developing into shared work.
Staying connected to the wider conservation community is part of doing our job well. The relationships we renew and build at these gatherings give us people to call when a new question comes up, colleagues to learn from as our programs grow, and opportunities to share what our partners in Ecuador and Peru have learned through years of work.
We look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks.
