June 20, 2013
Merrick Hoben, Director of CBI’s Corporate Stakeholder Engagement practice, recently facilitated a WWF Forests Meeting in Panama. For the first time, this event brought together WWF’s Forest Team, the Forest Advisory Group, the Global Forest and Trade Network and other contributors in a single weeklong meeting.
Despite initial concerns that combining multiple programmatic groups would lead to loosely threaded discussions, the organizers worked to find common ground and the meeting led to collaborative, productive, and insightful work on how to meet WWF’s strategic forest goals in a unified way.
Discussion focused on shifting from successful but independent forest interventions to an integrated Forest Sector Transformation program that unites WWF’s private sector engagement with policy advocacy and standards work to multiply WWF’s conservation impact. The overall goal is “ZNDD”: zero net deforestation and forest degradation in WWF priority places by 2020.