2022 Annual Meeting Recap - Collaborating to Solve Our Greatest Challenges
To everyone who attended Keeping Forests Annual Meeting in Mobile, thank you for making this event a success! Your collaboration, ideas, and resources have energized our efforts for 2023, and we are excited to see what we can accomplish together in the new year.
In an effort to keep our entire coalition engaged and up to speed on our goals for the coming year, we are providing the following information as a re-cap of our meeting and our next steps. Here are the three key takeaways from our meeting:
Keeping Forests will launch a Conservation Design Challenge to support the development of real, innovative solutions to grow Southern forest markets.
The knowledge and resources provided last week will inform the next phase of this project. We look forward to keeping you informed on next steps.
We will continue to pursue strategies that promote, expand, and catalyze Traditional and Emerging Forest Markets.
To learn more about our goals for 2023 and how you can stay engaged, download the briefings of each workstream below:
We will continue to engage key influencers with E-NGOs and Land Grant universities across the U.S. South to communicate the many values of working forests to the public.
Click here to download the Champions & Leaders workstream strategy briefing. To learn more about how you can stay up to speed on this work, connect with Communications Specialist Zach Clifton at zach@gfagrow.org.
As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to each out to me or anyone on the Keeping Forests team.
Sincerely,
Laura Calandrella
Private Sector Paving The Way
A series of leaders from the corporate sector offered perspectives on natural capitalism, the role of working forests in achieving sustainability goals, and the future of traditional and emerging forest economies.
These two talks link directly to Keeping Forests' strategies of expansion of sustainable paper and packaging markets, and promoting the use of wood in architectural design and building construction.
Session Speakers:
2023 Conservation Design Challenge
In 2023, Keeping Forests will launch a Conservation Design Challenge that incentivizes innovation to accelerate markets for sustainably managed forests.
We spoke with experts from Conservation X Labs who design open innovation competitions to address complex issues like wildfire management, eliminating plastic microfibers from clothing, and transforming mining practices in the rainforest. This talk demonstrates the power of bringing solutions to major issues from the outside in.
Communication Is Key
We had the pleasure of hearing from three national efforts that are focused on communicating the benefits of forests and forest products to a broad group of stakeholders.
Important to our communications efforts is the development of meaningful and relevant content that is positioned with organizations and individuals who can help increase our impact with the right audiences. Together, we worked to identify key content and relationships to pursue in the next 12-18 months.
Panel Speakers:
Oyster farmer Hugh McClure of Point aux Pins Oysters demonstrating the cleaning process on the outskirts of the Grand Savanna Bay Nature Preserve near Bayou La Batre, Alabama.
Connecting Forests to Water
The Grand Bay Savanna Landscape served as the anchor point for a discussion on the forest-water connection. Grand Bay and the surrounding area illustrate the downstream impacts of privately owned forests on quality of life across the watershed. We explored topics of biodiversity, climate resilience, water quality and quantity, and the impact of managed forests on rural economies that extend beyond forest landowners themselves.
At the heart of this discussion was the importance of working forests and ensuring that sustainable markets exist that support their continued stewardship of their lands.
Share Our Photos
Check out our photo album full of photos from this year's Annual Meeting in Mobile. Make sure you share them across social media and tag us and use #KeepingForests!
With Gratitude
A special thanks to the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities for their continued support of Keeping Forests and sponsorship of this meeting. Resource Management Services graciously invited us to toast to the end of the year at a Wednesday night social. The Nature Conservancy was critical to designing our field visit. We couldn't have done it without you!
