PC28 is important because it is the first Plants Committee meeting of a new three-year cycle, running up to the next big conference, CoP21, expected in Panama City in November 2028. At CoP20 in 2025, countries adopted more than 250 decisions, many of which now need to be turned into working guidance on how trade permits should be issued and how trade should be monitored.
What will be discussed at PC28?
The committee will cover range of topics like strategic and capacity-building matters, illegal trade and enforcement, exemptions and special trade rules, regional reports, and nomenclature, which is the standard scientific naming of species used to keep trade permits consistent across the 185 member countries.
On individual species, the committee is expected to focus heavily on the timber trade, including African and South American rosewoods, Brazil wood used in violin bows, and African mahoganies and ebonies, along with agarwood-producing plants such as Aquilaria and Gyrinops species, for which the committee has been refining trade guidance since 2022.
The Review of Significant Trade, a process that checks whether trade in a species is being carried out sustainably, will again be on the table, this time looking at rosewood and agarwood trade, forest conservation linked to CITES, and the traceability of Brazil wood used in musical instrument bows.
For the first time, fungi will be discussed as a separate agenda item, a sign that CITES’ scientific interest is widening beyond plants and animals.
The last Plants Committee meeting, PC27, was held in Geneva in July 2024 where the committee updated standard names for several plant groups, including orchids, ebonies, African mahoganies and yews, looked at a global study on the trade in edible orchids used in dishes like salep and chikanda, and continued work on agarwood trade guidance through a working group that India was part of.
These discussions were fed into CoP20, held in Samarkand from late November to early December 2025. Countries reviewed ten proposals to change the CITES lists for plants. Proposals to remove protections for red doussié, African padauk and Parlatore’s podocarp were voted down, while the Chilean palm was added to Appendix I, the strictest protection category, by consensus. Guggul, a plant used widely in Ayurvedic medicine, saw a more dramatic turn, a European Union proposal to list it under Appendix II was rejected at first, in a committee-level vote where India argued that a proper population study was needed before any decision.