The international conference „Equality and Diversity in Forestry: The Changing Image of Forestry“ was held in Portorož/Slovenia October 24-25th 2024, and it was both an honour and a pleasure for WOFO to be co-host alongside the Fem2Forest project team! 

The main objective of the conference was to launch a debate, to find innovative ways to increase the participation of women in forestry and to create new networks and contacts. The conference hosted 19 speakers who shed light on the topic through their eyes and experiences. The participation of 114 experts from 25 countries surprised us positively and gave us new impetus for future work.

Under the motto „Opening the umbrella“, WOFO International was taken literally as an umbrella organization, so that the focus was on supporting and networking projects and organizations. And we strongly hope to set up new roots in East and West: Two Mongolian women talked about their newly founded association and Catalan forest owners got tips for starting a new association in their Spanish homeland.

A total of 13 lectures were supplemented on the second day with an excursion to the Slovenian karst landscape on the border with Italy. There participants learned a lot about the history of the region and the forest, including a major forest fire two years ago. The trees the participants planted together to support natural regeneration will be a reminder and a memory of the gathering.