2011 was declared the International Year of Forests by the United Nations. In response, WRM has launched a campaign that challenges the definition of “forest” used by FAO. This is not a simple matter of semantics: FAO’s definition of forest has negative repercussions at the local and global level because it legitimizes the expansion of industrial monoculture tree plantations. Even worse, other UN organizations and initiatives, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as numerous national governments, use this same definition in negotiations, programmes and policies.
This has led us to develop a number of different activities that we detail below