On Friday morning Co-chairs Everton Vieira Vargas and Manfred Konukiewitz opened the final plenary by introducing the draft chairmen’s summary of the conference's conclusions and recommendations to be submitted to both the June 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or Rio+20) and the 10th Sessions of the UN Forum on Forests to be held in 2013.

Chief facilitator Alexander Buck, International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), provided an overview of the structure and elements of the draft Chairmen's summary. The draft summary is a six-page document containing an introduction, a set of main conference findings, and a last section containing recommended actions. The findings are grouped into five broad categories. The action recommendations are clustered around the themes of the conference's four working groups, plus a section on cross-cutting issues.

Co-chair Vargas stressed that this was not a negotiating text, and thus not open to renegotiation. He explained that the objective of the final plenary was to gauge participants' reactions and degree of comfort with the text.

The plenary then discussed the draft summary page by page. Participants offered comments to convey the spirit of the conference, including inter alia: utilizing new language to increase urgency; expanding certain descriptions to accurately represent areas of opportunities for increasing scope of benefits; identifying missing issues, such as the need to increase the prioritization of forests across all sectors and within national plans, and the need for capacity building; clarifying the scope of bio-based products; not singling out any specific conventions; and removing direct references to specific conventions from the text.

Co-chair Vargas said the finalized summary will incorporate the views to the maximum extent possible and encouraged governments to assimilate its substance into their respective preparatory work for UNCSD. Co-chair Konukiewitz said the summary will be finalized and posted online by Friday, 14 October 2011.

Michael Martin, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), closed the conference with a statement underscoring three messages: unifying the efforts across initiatives and institutions on forests for Rio+20; integrating knowledge from both science and stakeholders at all levels in the forest community; and increasing the visibility of forest products.

The conference closed at 11:35 AM.