The goal of the Paramaribo Dialogue is to identify opportunities to significantly enhance financing for sustainable forest management. To that end, the meeting will share experiences on mobilizing forest funding and generating revenues, identify existing and emerging public and private financing sources, and examine the relationship between forest financing and forest-related governance and enabling environments for investment. The meeting will also explore models, strategies and institutional arrangements for increased financing through such means as bilateral and multilateral public funding mechanisms, debt reduction, payments for ecosystem services (such as water and carbon), private sector commercial investment and private philanthropy.

This meeting builds upon the international commitments on sustainable forest management and particularly upon the outcome of the UNFF-7. Within this context the international community has adopted a “Non-Legally Binding Instrument (NLBI)” for all types of forests. One of the most important elements of this international forest instrument was the agreement that increasing financing for sustainable development will entail the establishment of a broad array of funds from national, international, public and private sources, in tandem with the strengthening of enabling policy environments and forest-related governance and management.

Consensus was also reached on the fact that during the next meeting of UNFF (UNFF-8) an international finance mechanism will be developed to support implementation of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM). UNFF-8 will be held from 20 April -1 May 2009 at the UN Headquarters in New York, and will be preceded by an UNFF Ad-Hoc Expert Group (AHEG) meeting to be held from 3-7 November 2008 in Vienna, in order to “develop specific proposals for the development of a voluntary global finance mechanism/portfolio approach/ forest financing framework”.