Happy Seattle Forest Week to everyone! With leaves falling, mushrooms popping, and salmon coming home, we have returned again to our season of planting and celebration in Seattle’s forests!
This year, Seattle Forest Week has included an extra special opportunity to celebrate our collective accomplishments on an international stage. The Sixteenth meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) is being held in Cali, Colombia this week. A City of Seattle delegation has brought Green Seattle Partnership’s work front and center in several presentations during the week. With 80% of the global population living in cities, COP16 brings a distinct focus on urban actors as key players in global biodiversity—a welcome recognition of the importance of our local work!
We shared last December that Seattle had been selected as a “Role Model City” by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in large part because of the community-centered ecological restoration work accomplished through our partnership. COP16 has been an important chance to advance learning and relationship building among the 18 cohort cities. Cities like Paris have expressed how inspired they have been by Green Seattle and are initiating similar programming. The scale of work in giant cities like Sao Paulo and Mexico City is a chance to see opportunities to build and expand on our success here in Seattle.
Seattle Parks and Recreation’s Superintendent AP Diaz and Natural Resource Manager Stephanie Shelton represented Green Seattle Partnership during a day of sharing with restoration practitioners, ecologists, planners and the Mayor’s Office of Barranquilla, Colombia. They visited the Ciénaga de Mallorquin, a massive eco park that addresses pollution, conserves critical coastal mangrove habitat, and improves community access and care. Stephanie Shelton shared “it was inspiring to learn how they embedded community engagement from day one in the restoration work”.
The meeting did not avoid the hard realities of climate change. The delegation participated in a ‘Radical Realism’ dialog with Dr. Deborah Roberts, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Director of the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit in eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa). It was clear that we need big, bold and large-scale actions now to address risks to ecosystem and human health globally and locally.
We know locally and UNEP has confirmed internationally that forests in cities are nature-based solutions for addressing heat islands and fighting climate stressors. Efforts to address the loss of habitat and biodiversity also are increasingly centering community and local knowledge in restoration approaches. Conversations at COP16 during a special Restoration Day further affirmed that when we target work and investments that start with community, outcomes are more successful. Local knowledge empowers urban restoration to be both rooted and adaptive, allowing us all to better navigate dynamic and uncertain futures.
Seattle Forest Week has been an important chance to welcome people to parks and other spaces across the city to take action together. We heard loud and clear from participants at Green Seattle Day last weekend that getting outside for some focused time to rebuild relationships with the land and with neighbors is a critical strategy to build resilience.
Join us for land care events and skills building all year round! Learn more about Green Seattle Partnership by watching the recent Community Connections Workshop, attending an upcoming event, or accessing resources.