New solutions for a better world

International Day of Forests (March 21) was approved by the United Nations General Assembly on November 28, 2012 and was first marked in 2013. Since then, this event has been celebrated annually with different themes.

This year, the International Day of Forests was entitled “Forests and Innovation: New Solutions for a Better World”. The content of the message is to emphasise how innovation can help people restore, protect, manage and use forests sustainably. Through innovation in approach and action, together we can build a better world with a more ecological environment, a more developed economy and an improved quality of life.

Director of the Forestry Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Tran Quang Bao said that this message helps people to realise the great potential of forests. Materials derived from forests have been used by people around the world throughout the formation and evolution of humanity. However, we have only accessed a small part of that “treasure”.

Over the past decades, the United Nations Committee on Climate Change has developed analytical frameworks and methods to properly and fully determine the potential and use value of forest ecosystems. Direct value is the raw materials and physical products taken from the forest and used directly in human production, consumption and trading activities, such as wood, firewood, forestry products, and genetic materials.

Indirect value is the economic value of the environmental services and ecological functions that forests create, such as maintaining and regulating water resources, limiting floods, controlling erosion, absorbing and storing carbon, regulating climate, and conserving biodiversity. Selection values are the unknown values of genetic resources, wild animals in the forest and forest ecological functions when they are applied in the fields of entertainment, medicine, and agriculture in the future.

Residual values are direct or indirect values that future generations will have the opportunity to use.

Existence value is the intrinsic value that comes with the existence of species in forests and forest ecosystems, regardless of direct use, such as cultural, historical, aesthetic, and heritage significance.

Today, the development of technology allows people to exploit values from nature more effectively and wisely to sustainably replace plastic materials, construction materials, fabrics, medicines and others. This is also consistent with the perspective and orientation of Vietnam’s forestry industry on renewing perspective, awareness and action to promote and exploit the multiple values of forests. These were specified in the Project on developing multi-use values of forest ecosystems until 2030, with a vision to 2050, approved by the Prime Minister in Decision No. 208/QD-TTg, dated February 29, 2024.

The message of this year’s International Day of Forests also stresses the need to restore, develop, protect, manage, and sustainably use forests based on scientific, technological and innovative achievements such as satellite technology, drones, biological technology, plant varieties, or materials technology.