Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests [1st ed.] 978-3-030-15838-5;978-3-030-15839-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Introduction (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 3-5
The Definition and Meaning of Sustainable Forest Management (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 7-9
The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 11-28
Front Matter ....Pages 29-29
Policy and the Political Will (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 31-45
Institutions and Policy Instruments Required to Ensure Forests Are Managed Sustainably (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 47-57
Land Rights Issues and Rural Poverty (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 59-66
Front Matter ....Pages 67-67
The Sustainability of Biodiversity (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 69-74
Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 75-92
Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 93-114
Illegal Logging (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 115-121
Front Matter ....Pages 123-123
The Value of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 125-132
Valuation of Forest Ecosystem, Environmental and Social Services (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 133-142
Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 143-158
International and Global Issues (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 159-163
Front Matter ....Pages 165-165
Verification of Sustainability (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 167-172
Awareness Raising Among Politicians and the Public in General (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 173-181
Conclusions (Alastair Fraser)....Pages 183-199
Back Matter ....Pages 201-213

Citation preview

Sustainable Development Goals Series Life on Land

Alastair Fraser

Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests

Sustainable Development Goals Series Series editors R. B. Singh, Delhi Sch of Econ, Univ of Delhi, Dept of Geography,  Delhi, Delhi, India Suraj Mal, Department of Geography, Shaheed Bhagat,  University of Delhi, Delhi, India Michael E. Meadows, EGS, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch,  South Africa

World leaders adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Providing in-depth knowledge, this series fosters comprehensive research on the global targets to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice and tackle climate change. Sustainability of Future Earth is currently a major concern for the global community ans has been a central theme for a number of major global initiatives viz. Health and Well-being in Changing Urban Environment, Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, COP21, Habitat III and Future Earth Initiative. Perceiving the dire need for Sustainable Development, the United Nations and world leaders formulated the SDG targets as a comprehensive framework based on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The goals call for action by all countries, poor, rich and middle-income, to promote prosperity while protecting the planet earth and its life support system. For sustainability to be achieved, it is important to have inputs from all sectors, societies and stakeholders. Therefore, this series on the Sustainable Development Goals aims to provide a comprehensive platform to the scientific, teaching and research communities working on various global issues in the field of geography, earth sciences, environmental science, social sciences and human geosciences, in order to contribute knowledge towards the current 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Volumes in the Series are organized by the relevant goal, and guided by an expert international panel of advisors. Contributions are welcome from scientists, policy makers and researchers working in the field of any of the following goals: No Poverty Zero Hunger Good Health and Well-Being Quality Education Gender Equality Clean Water and Sanitation Affordable and Clean Energy Decent Work and Economic Growth Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure Reduced Inequalities Sustainable Cities and Communities Responsible Consumption and Production Climate Action Life Below Water Life on Land Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions Partnerships for the Goals The theory, techniques and methods applied in the contributions will be benchmarks and guide researchers on the knowledge and understanding needed for future generations. The series welcomes case studies and good practices from diverse regions, and enhances the understanding at local and regional levels in order to contribute towards global sustainability. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15486

Alastair Fraser

Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests

Alastair Fraser Consultant in Forest Policy and Economics Perthshire, UK

ISSN 2523-3084     ISSN 2523-3092 (electronic) Sustainable Development Goals Series ISBN 978-3-030-15838-5    ISBN 978-3-030-15839-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935525 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the Fraser Forestry Foundation, Indonesia.

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Preface

As undergraduates, studying forestry in the mid-1950s we were taught about the principles of sustainable forest management, and these have not really changed over the years. At that time, “sustainability” was not much talked about outside forestry circles, and so life as a professional forester became a battle between the principles and the reality of a society that valued the short term over the long. Having become deeply involved in international forestry affairs, it has been distressing to see so much of the world’s forests being destroyed, largely for short-term financial gain, with little thought for all the other living organisms that rely on forests for their habitat. The livelihoods of communities that live in or near forests have been destroyed or compromised through loss of access to a multitude of resources that they can obtain from the trees, other plants, and animals that live in forests. Many such organisms are now either extinct or are seriously endangered. An enormous amount of time and effort has been put into international meetings and fora to discuss the definition of, and need for, the sustainable management of forests, but with a few notable exceptions there is little to show for it on the ground. The reasons for this lack of progress are manifold, but they can be boiled down to a few key issues that need to be addressed. The usurpation of land by the state in many countries has tended to lead to a “tragedy of the commons” and overexploitation. The separation of responsibility for timber production, conservation, and forest industry within government hierarchies has led to contradictions and confusion in policies. The attempts to promote sustainable forest management by market-oriented instruments such as “certification” and Voluntary Agreements have resulted in leakage and the displacement of the curse of illegal logging. There are some notable examples of initiatives that have achieved some sort of sustainability, and the features that they share are strong leadership, multi-stakeholder involvement, and the sustaining of effort and funding over a very long time period: over 20 years. Too many development initiatives have a short, politically determined time frame and so never achieve sustainability.

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Preface

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This book is very much a practitioner’s perspective and draws on much research conducted by others as well as an analysis of the main global ­forestry database developed by FAO over many years. It concludes with a “to-do list” of things for various stakeholders. It hopes to inspire young people considering a career in forestry to do what is needed and perhaps a few “Champions” for the cause to devote some time and effort to persuading politicians and the public about the need for action. Perthshire, UK

Alastair Fraser

Contents

Part I Background 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   3 2 The Definition and Meaning of Sustainable Forest Management ������������������������������������������������������������������������   7 3 The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests������������������  11 Assessing Sustainable Management������������������������������������������������   11 Changes in Forest Area in the Last 5 Years��������������������������������������   12 Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation����������������������������   19 Illegal Logging��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 Property Rights and Land Ownership����������������������������������������������   22 Supply and Demand for Forest Products ����������������������������������������   22 Market Failure in Forest Products����������������������������������������������������   23 Institutional and Financial Issues����������������������������������������������������   24 Is Sustainable Forest Management Possible?����������������������������������   26 Part II Institutional Issues 4 Policy and the Political Will������������������������������������������������������������  31 The Politics of Sustainable Forest Management������������������������������   31 The Benefits of Managing Forest Resources Sustainably����������������   33 The Need to Achieve Consensus Among Stakeholders ������������������   33 Forest Policy and the Instruments to Implement It��������������������������   34 The Politics of Land-Use and Ownership����������������������������������������   35 The Politics of Incentives for Sustainable Forest Management������   42 5 Institutions and Policy Instruments Required to Ensure Forests Are Managed Sustainably��������������������������������������������������  47 Institutional Arrangements��������������������������������������������������������������   47 Policy Instruments ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 Legal Instruments����������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 Financial Instruments����������������������������������������������������������������������   52 Technical Instruments����������������������������������������������������������������������   54 Human Resources����������������������������������������������������������������������������   55 ix

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6 Land Rights Issues and Rural Poverty������������������������������������������  59 Land Ownership������������������������������������������������������������������������������   59 Rural Poverty ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   62 Community Forestry������������������������������������������������������������������������   66 Part III Sustainabiliity 7 The Sustainability of Biodiversity��������������������������������������������������  69 Landscape Management������������������������������������������������������������������   69 Protected Areas��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   72 Baseline Biodiversity Studies����������������������������������������������������������   73 International Initiatives��������������������������������������������������������������������   74 8 Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change ��������������������  75 Soil Erosion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 The Contribution of Forests to Climate Change������������������������������   78 Potential Impacts of Global Warming����������������������������������������������   80 Changes in Sea Level����������������������������������������������������������������������   80 Extreme Weather Events������������������������������������������������������������������   82 Changes in Hydrological Systems ��������������������������������������������������   83 Distribution of Agro-ecological Zones��������������������������������������������   84 The Contribution of Forests to Solving the Problem ����������������������   85 Incentives for Avoiding Deforestation and Forest Degradation������   87 9 Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  93 Consumption of Timber Products����������������������������������������������������   93 Production Forest ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 Forest Timber Growing Stock����������������������������������������������������������   96 Supply–Demand Balance����������������������������������������������������������������   98 Trade-in Timber Forest Products ����������������������������������������������������   99 The Structure of the Timber Processing Industry����������������������������  101 Forest Management for Timber Production������������������������������������  104 Adding Value to Timber Products����������������������������������������������������  105 Non-timber Forest Products������������������������������������������������������������  106 Wood-Based Energy: Fuelwood and Charcoal��������������������������������  106 Properties of Wood as an Energy Source ������������������������������������  107 Wood Energy Conversion Technology����������������������������������������  110 Other Non-timber Forest Products��������������������������������������������������  111 Forest Grazing����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  113 10 Illegal Logging��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115 Definition of Illegal Logging ����������������������������������������������������������  115 Extent of Illegal Logging ����������������������������������������������������������������  115 Drivers of Illegal Logging����������������������������������������������������������������  118 Impact of Illegal Logging����������������������������������������������������������������  119 Combatting Illegal Logging ������������������������������������������������������������  120 Technological Solutions������������������������������������������������������������������  121

Contents

Contents

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Part IV Economic Issues 11 The Value of Timber and Non-­timber Forest Products��������������  125 The Value of Forest for Production of Timber ��������������������������������  125 Timber Harvesting ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  126 Timber Values����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  128 Plantations����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  128 Bioprospecting ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 12 Valuation of Forest Ecosystem, Environmental and Social Services������������������������������������������������������������������������  133 Forest Ecological Functions and Values������������������������������������������  133 Forest Environmental Functions and Values������������������������������������  134 Rainfall and Floods����������������������������������������������������������������������  134 Rainfall and Erosion��������������������������������������������������������������������  137 Wind and Waves��������������������������������������������������������������������������  138 Forest Carbon������������������������������������������������������������������������������  139 Social Functions and Values of Forest and Ecotourism ������������������  140 13 Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration ������������������������  143 Establishment of Forest Management Units������������������������������������  143 Management Tasks��������������������������������������������������������������������������  146 Boundary Marking ����������������������������������������������������������������������  146 Forest Inventory ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  147 Forest Management Planning������������������������������������������������������  149 Management Plans ����������������������������������������������������������������������  150 Roads and Access����������������������������������������������������������������������������  154 Yield Regulation������������������������������������������������������������������������������  156 Monitoring and Supervision������������������������������������������������������������  157 The Cost of Sustainability����������������������������������������������������������������  157 14 International and Global Issues����������������������������������������������������  159 Conflicting Sustainable Development Goals ����������������������������������  159 Market Failure for Forests and Forest Products������������������������������  160 Natural Capital Accounting��������������������������������������������������������������  161 Cross-Border and Trade Issues��������������������������������������������������������  162 International Agreements ����������������������������������������������������������������  163 Part V The Way Forward 15 Verification of Sustainability��������������������������������������������������������  167 Criteria and Indicators����������������������������������������������������������������������  168 16 Awareness Raising Among Politicians and the Public in General��������������������������������������������������������������  173 Developed Countries������������������������������������������������������������������������  173 Developing Countries����������������������������������������������������������������������  178 Target Audiences and Media Campaigns����������������������������������������  179 A Parting Shot����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  180

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17 Conclusions�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 183 Key Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������  183 Analytical Results������������������������������������������������������������������������  183 For Action������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  184 Overall Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������  185 Chapter 1��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  185 Chapter 2��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  186 Chapter 3��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  186 Chapter 4��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  186 Chapter 5��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  188 Chapter 6��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  189 Chapter 7��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  189 Chapter 8��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  190 Chapter 9��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  190 Chapter 10������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 Chapter 11������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  193 Chapter 12������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  194 Chapter 13������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  196 Chapter 14������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 Chapter 15������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  198 Chapter 16������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  198 References ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 201 Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 209

Contents

About the Author

Alastair Fraser  Based in Scotland, he has recently retired after a 55-year career as a professional forester working in the United Kingdom and 45 other countries around the world. He graduated from Aberdeen University in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in forestry and completed a doctorate at Edinburgh University in 1970 with focus on the interaction between climate and forests. He is also the author of the textbook Making Forest Policy Work and Forestry Flavours of the Month: the Changing Face of World Forestry and has published 128 papers and reports on a wide range of topics. In 1973 he cofounded a forestry consultancy company that became LTS International Ltd.

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Part I Background

1

Introduction

In the late 1980s, as the world was preparing for the UN Conference on Environment and Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, loss of tropical forests became a hot political topic. One consequence was that the British government pledged a large sum of money to support efforts in developing countries to introduce sustainable forest management and halt deforestation. That decision eventually resulted in the author travelling to Indonesia to manage the joint Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Programme. It enabled the continuation of work begun in 1974 on tropical forest management in the Asia-Pacific region, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which came to a shuddering halt in 1975 when the UN ran out of money and cancelled all projects. The main outcome of the Rio Conference was the Non-Legally Binding Authoritative Statement on Principles for Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of all types of Forests, known as the “Forestry Principles”. The lack of any legally binding agreement to take action was a spur to civil society that led eventually to the establishment of the Non-Government Organisation, the Forest Stewardship Council. This was aimed at the timber industry with a view to getting private sector involvement in improving the quality of management of tropical forests.

In the decades that followed the Rio Conference, from a practitioner’s perspective, forestry matters seemed to sink down in the political agenda, until climate change became a hot topic. It became clear that forests had a major role to play, both in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases resulting from deforestation and forest degradation and as a sink for sequestering carbon dioxide emitted by industry and transport. However, things were rumbling on at the UN level with the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, followed by the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests and finally in the year 2000 the UN Forum on Forests. The outcome of the discussions organised by all these bodies came in 2007 with the adoption by the UN of the Non-Legally Binding Instrument on all types of Forests. This brief history of activities at the international level over the past two and a half decades shows that there has been a lot of discussion, but there is very little tangible evidence in the field of anything having changed. So the question is will Sustainable Development Goals make any difference? The Sustainable Development Goals established in 2015 under the auspices of the United Nations include number 15 that refers to forestry: “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of, terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss”. The

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_1

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goal has 12 specific targets to be achieved in the coming 5–15 years as follows: 1. By 2020, ensure the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services, in particular forests, wetlands, mountains and drylands, in line with obligations under international agreements 2. By 2020, promote the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally 3. By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world 4. By 2030, ensure the conservation of mountain ecosystems, including their biodiversity, in order to enhance their capacity to provide benefits that are essential for sustainable development 5. Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species 6. Promote fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources and promote appropriate access to such resources, as internationally agreed 7. Take urgent action to end poaching and trafficking of protected species of flora and fauna and address both demand and supply of illegal wildlife products 8. By 2020, introduce measures to prevent the introduction and significantly reduce the impact of invasive alien species on land and water ecosystems and control or eradicate the priority species 9. By 2020, integrate ecosystem and biodiversity values into national and local planning, development processes, poverty reduction strategies and accounts 10. Mobilise and significantly increase financial resources from all sources to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystems

1 Introduction

11. Mobilise significant resources from all sources and at all levels to finance sustainable forest management and provide adequate incentives to developing countries to advance such management, including for conservation and reforestation 12. Enhance global support for efforts to combat poaching and trafficking of protected species, including by increasing the capacity of local communities to pursue sustainable livelihood opportunities. Within the 12 targets to be achieved in the coming 5–15 years, the first two are specific to forestry, two cover ecosystems that are liable to include trees (drylands and mountains) and one refers to reforestation. The remainder are more general and apply to the management of all natural ecosystems. Two indicators have been set that are intended for monitoring progress towards achieving the goals. However, the first is stated as “the forest area as a proportion of a country’s land area”, which is actually rather meaningless since there is no optimum proportion of land area that should be forest and sustainable management of forests is not dependent on how much forest a country has. The forest area can change as a result of many possible events: the area of prime natural forest could decrease and be replaced with plantations, for example, leaving the total forest area and its proportion of the land area unchanged. A more useful indicator would be change in the area of primary natural forest. The second indicator is just stated as “progress towards sustainable forest management” which, without a baseline and indicators with threshold values, will be difficult to judge whether progress has been made as it is not something that can be readily measured. Evaluating results in 2020 or 2030 will be difficult. Although there are several systems of Criteria and Indicators for different regions of the world (see Chap. 15 for details) that can be used for assessing sustainability, these have serious limitations. The only single indicator, which is relatively comprehensive and currently available for monitoring sustainability of forest management is the “Certification” system operated by the Forest Stewardship

1 Introduction

Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) both of which are primarily aimed at production forests in order to reassure the consumers of forest products that they are not contributing to forest loss and degradation. The goal’s first target describes action that is required in line with international agreements, which is primarily the Non-legally binding agreement on all types of forests referred to earlier; but there are no international legally binding agreements relating to sustainable forest management, only on Biological Diversity and Trade in Endangered Species. These are covered in other goals. There is no specific target for how much forest should be sustainably managed by 2020, nor is there indication of the resources required (human and financial) or available to achieve the goals. The 10th and 11th targets recognise that financial resources are needed but give no indication as to where the resources might come from, the magnitude of the resources required and the need for innovative approaches to developing new sources of funding like payments for ecosystem services such as soil and water conservation and carbon sequestration. An attempt at assessing the magnitude of these requirements is made in the later chapters. The need to achieve sustainable forest management has been discussed for almost three decades, during which time about 500 million ha of production forest has been certified as being sustainably managed, but a large proportion of that was being managed more or less sustainably prior to the certification system coming into effect and it includes substantial areas of plantation forests. Plenty has been written about the principles of Sustainable Forest Management and WHAT it is, but little attention has been paid to the HOW to make it happen, which involves looking at the reasons why only about 15% of the world’s forests are currently being managed sustainably.

5

As we will see later, it has taken bodies such as the UN Forum on Forests and Forest Europe and others more than 20  years to come up with a definition of Sustainable Forest Management that is clear and can be accepted by (almost) everyone. This shows how complex the topic is and as a consequence, how difficult it will be to achieve. In order to facilitate the discussion, the book is divided into five parts: the first is general background and deals with the definition and current status of the Sustainable Management of Forests globally; the second part deals with institutional issues, including policy, policy instruments, the organisation of forestry agencies and land tenure, which are the main group of indicators that the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) currently monitors; the third part deals with the issues relating to sustainability in practice and what is currently going on in the field, and for ease of discussion is divided into four chapters covering biodiversity, environmental services, production of timber and Non-timber forest products and Illegal logging, which we will see later is a crucial issue; the fourth part covers economic issues, which are fundamental to achieving Sustainable Forest Management and it has four chapters dealing with the value of forest products, the value of ecological, environmental and social services, the costs of sustainable Forest management and a number of related International issues; the fifth and final part is called The Way Forward and deals with the Verification of Sustainability and Public awareness and pulls everything together in the concluding chapter that highlights the various actions that need to be taken. Separating the technical issues of sustainability from the economic issues inevitably leads to some repetition but, while this is kept to a minimum, it is intended to help to emphasise to the reader the importance of the issues raised.

2

The Definition and Meaning of Sustainable Forest Management

Foresters have been taught for generations about the principles of forest management, which are based on sustainability. Technically it is relatively simple in that any removals from the forest, be it timber, non-timber products or wildlife (plant animal, insect or fungi), should be balanced by the regrowth/colonisation after the disturbance, with a small allowance for losses due to such things as disease or fire. Silviculture is all about organising interventions in such a way that damage is minimised and future growth is maximised as far as possible and habitats are maintained. In practice, it is not so simple, as there are financial issues such as balancing costs and revenues and the short term against the long term and in many tropical countries there are issues of who owns the forests and who has the right to decide what should and should not be done. In tropical forests, which normally contain a multitude of species and trees of different ages and sizes, there are also issues about how to ensure that the forest will regenerate with a similar mix within a reasonable period of time. Too much disturbance may allow fast growing pioneer species or climbers to become established which could change the composition of the forest dramatically. In Thailand part of the Kaeng Krachan National Park had been heavily logged over before the Park was declared, with the result that a substantial area was overrun with climbers that were smothering the remaining trees and prevent-

ing regeneration. The Park management faced the dilemma of whether to leave everything to nature, and perhaps in 50 years or more the climbers may begin to die off and allow tree species to regenerate or to intervene and cut the climbers to allow regeneration to establish; purists favoured the former and pragmatists the latter approach. The issue was complicated by the fact that the tangle of climbers was obstructing access to water holes and salt licks that are vital to much of the wildlife, and there was also the risk of facilitating the invasion by alien species if left to nature, which tends to favour the strong over the weak. Such problems are less common in the relatively species poor temperate forests of Europe, though other problems exists such as grazing by livestock preventing natural regeneration. During and prior to the 1970s in Greece, grazing by goats in the forest was widespread with the result that there was very little natural regeneration and the forests were ageing. Permanent sample plots indicated that the annual growth was declining steadily so that the Forest Department became increasingly conservative and reduced harvesting volumes. This merely exacerbated the problem and reduced the likelihood of ever achieving sustainability. Forest Europe: a Ministerial level conference of 46 European countries has developed a fairly simple definition of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM). The basis of the work by Forest Europe has been a common understanding

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_2

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8

2  The Definition and Meaning of Sustainable Forest Management

of what sustainable forest management encompasses. The term was defined in 1993  in the Helsinki resolution H1 as “the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfil, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions, at local, national, and global levels, and that does not cause damage to other ecosystems”. This definitionis straightforward but in some ways ambitious, as it seeks to cover national and global level sustainability, which is beyond the control of forest mangers let alone governments of European countries. The question of what are relevant ecological, environmental and social functions is left open. It also gives no guidance on the degree to which sustainability may be influenced by the silvicultural system adopted or how to cope with human induced problems such as the grazing referred to earlier. Clear felling may be economically attractive and maintain productivity in the very long term but it creates even aged stands and may have a negative impact on habitats, biodiversity and on the landscape. On the other hand, in some areas, fire is a natural phenomenon that is an important part of the regeneration cycle and results in more or less even aged stands. If left to nature, even in temperate regions, forests will become mixed in species composition and age classes over time, which may increase the value for these environmental services but reduce the commercial value so that the issue is more about balancing values rather than maintaining them. To what degree should the manager intervene, and how much should be left to nature? One option is to separate the timber production function from the other functions by creating plantations purely for the supply of timber as is done with commodities like rubber and palm oil. This may involve the clearance of some forest in the short term but could avoid the need to continue clearing forest in the medium to long term. Plantations can be managed for the sustainable supply of timber and apart from reducing pressure on natural forest may, but not necessarily, have some environmental benefits depending on

location and species composition. Large areas of monocultures of species such as Acacia, Eucalyptus, Salix or Picea sitchensis, because they are alien species in most places where they are planted, are quite different from natural forests in terms of their biodiversity and may also have negative environmental impacts. They have the advantage of high productivity and therefore can meet human needs for timber on a smaller area than would be required otherwise. In principle almost the entire human requirement for timber and fuelwood could be met from plantations, allowing natural forests to be left largely to provide environmental services and the supply of high value speciality species for particular purposes such as restoration of historic buildings, musical instruments and uses where the aesthetic properties of wood are important. Unfortunately, plantations are costly to establish and maintain and need to be accessible if they are for supplying large industrial users such as pulpmills. They also need to be established in large enough units to meet the volume requirements of the end-user. In the Lao PDR a project with an investment of around US$ 10 million financed many smallholder plantations aimed at meeting regional demand for small roundwood, mainly for pulp. However, the individual plantations were small, most just 1–2 ha, and they were scattered over a very large area in four Provinces, so that providing good extension support and supplying inputs such as plants and fertiliser was very costly. Subsequently the farmers were unable to obtain a good price when it came to harvesting because of the high cost in transport to market. A significant proportion of the forest area that has been certified to date is plantation forest, and it is doubtful if it should really be included as sustainably managed forest as they provide few of the environmental services and when harvested may even have a negative impact on the environment, for a while at least. Certifying that wood has come from well-managed plantations rather than from sustainably managed forest would be more to the point. An example of the problem is the fate of the teak plantations managed by the State Timber

2  The Definition and Meaning of Sustainable Forest Management

Company Perhutani on the island of Java in Indonesia. The plantations were established by the Dutch towards the end of the nineteenth century and had been well managed over the years with small areas of mature trees being felled annually and replanted using an agroforestry system referred to locally as tumpangsari. This allocated patches of cleared forest to local farmers who planted and tended replacement teak trees at a fairly wide spacing, and grew crops and fuelwood shrubs on the land between the trees for a couple of years after the teak was planted. This kept the teak free of weedy competition and provided a good livelihood for the villagers, who were given a new area every year or two as more forest was harvested and the young trees began to shade out the villager’s crops. The system had worked well for almost a century when it became one of the first forests in the tropics to be certified in 1990 by Smartwood. However, by 1998 things had changed dramatically. First, the availability of “certified timber” encouraged the rapid and uncontrolled expansion of the local furniture

9

industry, which greatly increased demand for the timber. Second, the impact of the Asian financial crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime increased lawlessness, poverty and legitimate employment in Java and resulted in illegal felling of the teak forests on an industrial scale. As a result the Certification was withdrawn in 1998. For more details see Ardana and Fuad (2001) and Bartley (2018). This means that not all forests in a country can be managed sustainably as there needs to be a balance between natural forests that provide many services and plantations that are primarily for timber production. The latter may need to be expanded at the expense of the former if human populations continue to grow and individual’s incomes continue to rise and increase demand for resources. The current issue about plastic pollution has seen recommendations for the greater use of paper for packaging and other items currently made from plastic, which could put further pressure on forests. This is discussed in more detail in Chap. 4 on policy issues.

3

The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

Assessing Sustainable Management Currently the only way to assess whether forest is being managed sustainably is through “Certification”. According to MacDicken et  al. (2015) less than 20% of the area of designated permanent forest around the world meets some of the criteria needed to be “Certified” as sustainably managed, and most of that is in the temperate forests and in plantations in the rich developed countries. An analysis of areas “Certified” by the two organisations referred to earlier (FSC and PEFC) as being sustainably managed at present suggests that about 500 million ha of forests are currently “Certified”. This is only 12.5% of the total forest area as defined and measured by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Global Forest Resource Assessment (FRA). Examination of the data from the websites of the two organisations suggests that there is some double counting as a result of some forest being certified by both parties. The most comprehensive and up-to-date information about the state of the world’s forests is the 2015 Global Forest Resource Assessment by FAO. This defines Forest land as: Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use.

On the basis of this definition the total area of forest in 2015 was 3999 million ha which represents 30.6% of the global total land area and it showed a net decline of about 16 million ha since 2010. Seventy-one countries showed an increase in forest area totalling 22.7 million ha, while 77 countries showed a loss of forest area totalling 38.7 million ha, which is the more telling figure. The assessment also records what is called “other wooded land”, which includes much of the open savannah woodland found in the drier parts of Africa and South America. The total area recorded in 2015 was about 952.5 million ha which was a net decline of about 20.5 million ha since 2010. The FRA also defines Primary forest as: Naturally regenerated forest of native species, where there are no clearly visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed.

And the total remaining area of primary forest is 1277 million ha or about 32% of the total forest area. 1054 million ha (82%) is in just nine countries. This Primary forest needs to be the priority for sustainable management as it provides the most complete and comprehensive set of economic, social and environmental benefits. 1118 million ha are in countries where there is “Certified” forest. The area of primary forest declined by 8.1 million ha between 2010 and 2015, which is very sad and further decline needs to be prevented urgently.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_3

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3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

12

The FRA defines Plantations as: “Forest predominantly composed of trees established through planting and/or deliberate seeding”, which has a subcategory that covers plantations with exotic species rather than indigenous species. This definition includes such specialities as Christmas trees and fuelwood crops.

By 2015 the total area of plantations worldwide had reached 292.4 million ha of which 271 million ha are in countries where there is “Certified forest”. The total area of plantations had increased by about 15.3 million ha since 2010 or by about 3 million ha annually. The final definition of interest here in the FRA is Permanent Forest Estate (PFE) which is defined as: Forest area that is designated by law or regulation to be retained as forest and may not be converted to other land use.

In 2015 there were a total of 1663 million ha that have been designated as Permanent forest in accordance with this definition which is almost 42% of the total forest area. One must assume that all the forest that has been certified is within the permanent forest, as this is one of the fundamental requirements for Sustainable Forest Management. If that is true, then about 30% of the permanent forest has been certified. A reason for this relatively low percentage could be that much of the Permanent forest may be in protected areas such as wildlife reserves or National Parks, which would not normally seek certification, as they are not producing and marketing timber. The available data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the Certifying agencies does not differentiate Permanent forest that is composed of plantations as opposed to natural forest, but it is probably safe to assume that the “Certified” forest area includes perhaps one-third of the plantation area covering about 100 million ha.

 hanges in Forest Area in the Last C 5 Years In order to examine the situation in the world’s forests, the 190 countries, for which a complete set of data on forest resources and other indicators

such as GDP are available, have been grouped into five regions that more or less correspond to major ecological regions. These are “Temperate”, “Central Asia”, “Subtropical”, “Arid” and “Equatorial”. Few countries lie exclusively within one region, but countries have been assigned to a region on a combination of their latitude range, the major forest types in the country and the proportion of the country that matches the general region description. Thus some countries may have some areas that match two or more of the regions, but have been placed within the one that matches the majority of the country’s area. This is a form of stratification that reduces the variation within the groups due to major climatic and ecological factors. Table  3.1 below summarises some basic data on the countries within each of the regions. As Table 3.1 shows, the extent of forest cover is very low in the “Central Asia” and “Arid” regions as one would expect, where the ecological conditions are not suited to forest development. The “Temperate” and “Equatorial” regions both have a substantial proportion of forest cover at 41% and 50% respectively and the “Subtropical” region has less than half of the forest cover of these two regions but double the population density. This suggests that population density may be a contributory factor for loss of forest cover. The total forest area showed a net decrease of 16 million ha between 2010 and 2015. However, that is the net loss, as 77 countries lost a total of 38.8 million ha of which about 22 million ha are in the “Equatorial” zoneregion, while 71 countries gained a total of 22.8 million ha of which about 15.4 million ha are new plantations. The difference between these figures and those given in Table 3.1 is due to lack of complete data for about 50 countries that are included in the Global Forest Resource Assessment, but have not been included in the data presented. The graphs in Fig. 3.1 for the “Temperate” and “Equatorial” regions where forest cover is highest are remarkably similar, with the decline in forest cover with increasing population density being significant at 98% and 95% probability respectively. The relationships are very similar

13

Changes in Forest Area in the Last 5 Years Table 3.1  Summary of basic data for countries assigned to each of broad ecological region Country type factor Number of countries Forest area 2010 (’000 ha) 2015 Change Land area (’000 ha) Forest 2015 cover % Population (million) Population density (p/km2) Per cap GDP (US$) Area of forest certified (’000 ha) Area of plantations (’000 ha) Area of primary forest (’000 ha) Permanent forest estate (’000 ha)

Temperate 46 1,689,354 1,692,335 2,981 4,120,023 41.1%

Central Asia 8 26,177 25,729 −448 560,480 4.6%

Subtropical 65 765,665 769,489 3,824 3,759,128 20.5%

Arid 20 23,162 22,097 −1065 1,354,012 1.6%

Equatorial 51 1,417,032 1,396,417 −20,615 2,778,882 50.3%

Total 190 3,921,390 3,906,067 −15,323 12,572,525 31.1%

1,206 29

84 15

3,994 106

353 26

1,551 56

7,188 57

34,485 426,793

3,785 0.3

6,736 45,901

6,592 212

3,725 27,691

10,700 500,596

131,034

1,876

123,161

2,295

27,245

285,611

560,370

13,673

96,508

580

560,398

1,231,529

634,521

10,788

386,098

5,988

606,765

1,644,160

and suggest that the elasticity of forest cover with respect to population pressure is about −1.2% or a 10% increase in population pressure will result in a decrease in forest cover by about 1.2%. This is very close to the findings from a study in Indonesia (Fraser 1998) that examined changes in forest cover over time and between the major islands of the country. In contrast, in the “Central Asia” zoneregion, where both forest cover and population density are low, the trend is the reverse, but insignificant, with forest cover increasing slightly with increasing population density. The higher forest cover and population density are in the most westerly countries of the region, which may be indicative of better soils and a wetter climate that supports greater forest development. In both the “Subtropical” and “Arid” zones there is no ­relationship between forest cover and population density. The “Subtropical” zone includes many small islands in the Caribbean and some in the Pacific, where the population is densely packed around the coast and the forest is on interior mountainous land, which is probably not suitable for agriculture. Kaplan et  al. (2009) developed a model for estimating historical trends in deforestation in

Europe during the period from 1000 BC to 1850 AD prior to the beginning of the industrial revolution. They used population density as the main driver of deforestation in their model, but adjusted it to take account of the amount of usable land, based on soil characteristics and climatic factors, on the assumption that farmers would only clear land for arable crops or pasture if it was suitable. Forest in mountainous terrain or with very cold climates would not be cleared. They also took account of technological change and ran an additional version of the model by adjusting the relationship between population density and forest cover at various times to reflect the increased carrying capacity of the land as technology improved; thus the population density per unit of usable land increased before further deforestation occurred. Their standard model indicates that forest cover across Europe was around 75% in the period around 1000 BC and that forest cover declined slowly to about 55% around 400 AD and then began to increase for about 300  years during the so-called Dark ages after which it resumed a steady decline to as low as 20% by 1850 AD. When possible technological changes are taken into account, it seems that deforestation

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

14

Temperate Countries: Forest Cover and Population Density 80.0% 70.0% Temperate Countries: Forest Cover and Population Density

60.0% 50.0%

Log.(Temperate Countries: Forest Cover and Population Density)

40.0% 30.0%

y = -0.261ln(x) + 0.5108 R² = 0.23032

20.0% 10.0% 0.0% 0.00

0.50

1.00

1.50

2.00

2.50

3.00

3.50

Central Asian Countries: Forest Cover and Population Density 16.0% 14.0% 12.0% 10.0% 8.0% 6.0%

Central Asian Countries: Forest Cover and... y = 0.0006x + 0.04 R² = 0.3978

4.0% 2.0%

Fig. 3.1  Graphs showing the relationship between forest cover per cent (vertical axis) and the natural logarithm of population density (horizontal axis) for the five ecological regions

was more extensive prior to 1000 BC, because agriculture was less efficient and forest cover was possibly as low as about 50%, after which the rate of decline in forest cover prior to about 400 AD was slower than with the standard model, when it reached about 35%. Forest cover then

increased to a maximum of about 60% around the time of the “Black Death” in the mid fifteenth century and then declined to around 40% in 1850. The current forest cover is about 30%, but it is difficult to be precise because of possible differences in the geographical coverage.

Changes in Forest Area in the Last 5 Years

15

Sub-Tropical Countries: Forest cover and Population Density 90.0% 80.0% 70.0% 60.0% Sub-Tropical Countries: Forest cover...

50.0% 40.0%

y = -0.0105x + 0.3408 R² = 0.0009

30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0% 0.00

0.50

1.00

1.50

2.00

2.50

3.00

3.50

Arid Countries: Forest Cover and Population Density 9.0% 8.0% 7.0% 6.0% 5.0% 4.0% 3.0%

Arid Countries: Forest Cover and... y = 4E-05ln(x) + 0.0232 R² = 8E-07

2.0% 1.0%

Fig. 3.1 (continued)

They also modelled six regions that appeared to be more homogenous within Europe. The western region followed a trend very similar to the standard model, but a Northern and Alpine region had very low forest cover per unit area of

usable land, because its low proportion of the total area meant that more of it had to be cleared to support the population. This contrasts with Eastern Europe, which has a high proportion of usable land but relatively low population density

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

16

Equatorial Countries: Forest cover and Population Density 120.0%

100.0%

80.0%

60.0%

Equatorial Countries: Forest cover and Population Density

40.0%

Log.(Equatorial Countries: Forest Cover and Population Density) y = -0.357ln(x) + 0.6464 R² = 0.28777

20.0%

0.0% 0.00

0.50

1.00

1.50

2.00

2.50

3.00

Fig. 3.1 (continued)

so that forest cover remained high through much of the period. These figures are consistent with those for the Temperate Countries shown in Fig.  3.1, which include Russian Federation and Canada with low population densities and high forest cover. While population density is a useful indicator of human pressure on the environment, since the industrial revolution and rapid population growth it incorporates a number of more direct drivers of deforestation such as agricultural expansion, urbanisation, infrastructure development like roads, dams and power lines and demand for natural resources including timber and minerals. Data from theglobaleconomy.com on agricultural employment by country around the world, when grouped according to the broad ecological regions discussed above, show the differences very clearly. The average proportion of total employment in agriculture, weighted according to the total GDP, is as follows: “Temperate” 2.99%, “Central Asia” 21.71%, “Subtropical” 15.98%, “Arid” 8.48% and “Equatorial” 23.9% as shown in Fig. 3.2 below.

In 2010 the population density in the 45 countries that lie predominantly in the temperate forest region was about a half that in the 51 that lie predominantly in the equatorial forest region, while the forest cover was about 8% lower. By 2015 the population density in the “Temperate” forest region countries had risen slightly, by about 1%, but forest cover had increased very slightly by about 0.12% while in the “Equatorial” region countries population density had risen sharply by almost 7% and forest cover had decreased by about 0.5%. The change in the forest cover in the Equatorial region is consistent with the elasticity of forest cover with respect to population pressure as shown in Fig. 3.1 above, but in the temperate region the sign is reversed; i.e. an increase rather than a decrease, but with the same order of magnitude. This suggests that Europe has passed a transition point from contraction to expansion. A closer look at the situation in the 30 “Equatorial” countries that lost forest between 2010 and 2015 suggests that the growth in population density was a strong driver of deforestation.

Changes in Forest Area in the Last 5 Years

17

GDP and Agricultural employment 40,000 35,000

Temperate

30,000

Y = -14075ln(x) + 45559 R2 = 0.84425

25,000

GDP and Agricultural employment

20,000 15,000

Log. (GDP and Agricultural employment)

10,000 Arid

5,000

Sub-tropical central Asia

Equatorial

0 0.00

5.00

10.00

15.00

20.00

30.00

25.00

Fig. 3.2  Weighted average per cent of employment in agriculture in relation to average national per capita GDP (US$ per cap) for the five ecological regions

Percent forest lost and change in population density 0.00% 0

10

20

30

40

50

Forest Loss percent

-5.00%

-10.00%

-15.00%

Percent forest lost and change in…

-20.00%

y = -0.0044x + 0.0057 R² = 0.5348

-25.00%

Change in Population Density Fig. 3.3  Percentage of forest cover lost with increasing population density for the 30 countries in the “Equatorial” region that lost forest during the period 2010–2015

The relationship is shown in Fig. 3.3, which indicates that an increase of one person per square kilometre is associated with a loss of about 0.3% in forest cover over a 5-year period. This is of the same order of magnitude as that found by the author (Fraser 1998) in a detailed study of changes

in forest cover in Indonesia, both over time and between the different islands. That analysis showed that a 1% increase in population density would lead to a loss in forest cover of between 0.15 and 0.4%, with the higher figure being when the data for the island of Java is excluded.

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

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% Increase in forest area with % forest cover 7.00%

Increase in Forest Area %

6.00% 5.00% 4.00% 3.00%

Increase in % forest with % forest

2.00%

y = -0.0646x + 0.0352 R² = 0.223

1.00% 0.00% 0.0%

20.0%

40.0%

60.0%

80.0%

Forest Cover % Fig. 3.4  Percentage increase in forest cover in relation to the existing forest cover per cent for 28 countries in the “Temperate” region

In contrast to the “Equatorial” region, the “Temperate” region showed a net increase in forest area with 28 of the 46 countries showing a gain collectively of 4 million ha, while five of the countries showed a total loss of about 1 million ha. About 800,000  ha of the increase were new plantations. The average percentage increase in the forest area in those countries that expanded their forest was 0.94%, but it was significantly correlated with the amount of forest cover in the country, with countries having a low forest cover expanding their forest the most; see Fig. 3.4. This is partly to be expected because of the physical limitations for expanding forest that is already large, but the fact that the countries with low forest cover expanded their forest area at a much higher rate indicates a desire to achieve a higher degree of forest cover. This was despite the fact that the population density in the 28 countries that increased forest area was 64 persons per square kilometre, or double the average for the region, and higher than in the “Equatorial” region. The reason that the population density was higher in the countries that gained forest was because the countries that lost forest included

Canada and Russian Federation, both with very low population densities but huge forest areas. Despite the net loss of forest cover in the “Equatorial” region there were 11 countries that gained a total of 3.2 million ha of forest area between 2010 and 2015, of which about 1.7 million ha were new plantations and about 550,000  ha that may have been “other wooded land” being reclassified as forest. However, the situation in the “Equatorial” region is somewhat different to that in the “Temperate” region as there appears to be no correlation between the increase in forest area and the extent of forest cover at present, nor with either the population density or the population density increase nor with per capita GDP. However, there does appear to be a significant relationship between the percentage increase in forest area and the agricultural employment percentage of GDP.  The relationship is positive with a 10% increase in the agriculture employment share of GDP being associated with a 1% increase in forest cover. For example, Burundi, where agriculture employment is 90% of GDP, achieved a 9% increase in forest cover between 2010 and 2015. See Fig. 3.5.

Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation

19

% Increase in forest area and Agriculture GDP %

Increase in Forest Area %

15.0%

10.0%

5.0%

% Increase in forest area…

0.0%

y = 0.0007x - 0.0072 R² = 0.1272

0

20

40

60

80

100

-5.0%

Agriculture GDP % Fig. 3.5  Percentage increase in forest cover in relation to the share of agriculture employment in GDP in 11 countries that gained forest area in the “Equatorial” zone

This is somewhat surprising, but may be because a high percentage of agriculture employment in the GDP is indicative of low forest cover in smaller or more densely populated countries but not in larger or more sparsely populated ones. The inference from this is therefore similar to that for the “Temperate” zone countries in that it seems that countries with a low forest cover are striving to increase their forest cover.

It also identified unsustainable wood extraction as the main driver of forest degradation. A more recent review of the Drivers of Deforestation and Forest Degradation by Kissinger et al. (2012) comes to more or less the same conclusion and attributes 80% of deforestation to agricultural expansion. The type of agriculture responsible varies between the continents, with cattle ranching being the largest contributor in Latin America, cash crops in Africa and ­commodity crops such as palm oil, rubber and Causes of Deforestation and Forest coffee in Asia. The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo cites population increase Degradation in certain areas driving the demand for fuelwood A study in Lao PDR by Mekong Maps into the as being a major contributor to forest degradadrivers of Deforestation and forest Degradation, tion. This was also true in the area around Addis reported in the REDDiness Preparation Proposal Ababa in Ethiopia, where the so-called Green (R-PP) submitted to the Forest Carbon Partnership Belt of Eucalyptus that had been established Facility at the World Bank, identified five direct early in the twentieth century to supply the city drivers of deforestation. These were: (1) large-­ with fuelwood was deteriorating rapidly due to scale expansion of cash crops and tree plantations over harvesting. The World Bank funded a major funded by Foreign Direct Investment; (2) small-­ project to restore the forest and expand the area in scale agricultural expansion by individual farm- the mid-1980s (see Box 9.1, Chap. 9). ers and pioneer shifting cultivation; (3) All these observations suggest that increasing infrastructure and urban development; (4) min- population pressure with the consequential ing; (5) dams for hydro-electricity and irrigation. increase in demand for more food and other

20

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

natural resources has been, and is likely to remain, a major factor contributing to loss of forest. However, they also suggest that it may be possible for the trend to be reversed as a result of improved agricultural productivity, industrialisation and urbanisation. It may take the developing countries some time to catch up with the developed countries and so the probability of continued loss of forest must be high for the foreseeable future. Many farmers in developing countries are too poor to be able to afford the additional inputs, such as fertilisers and mechanisation, that are needed to increase their productivity. This is partly a result of the generally very small size of land holdings, which means that farmers cannot create enough of a surplus to make farming a business rather than a subsistence activity. This is also the conclusion of the study by Kissinger et  al. referred to earlier. Increasing agricultural productivity will require a number of things to happen including some consolidation of land holdings into fewer larger units, increased mechanisation, increased inputs of energy and fertiliser, improved genetic material (both livestock and crops), alternative employment opportunities for those who leave the land and better training for those who continue to farm. Such measures will require enormous investment, which is usually in short supply in developing countries, but without progress along these lines it will be increasingly difficult to establish and maintain forest areas, without which Sustainable Management is not possible. The drivers of deforestation and forest degradation referred to above are the immediate or direct causes of the problem, but they in turn are the consequence of indirect drivers, because it is not inevitable that each of the main drivers should result in loss of forest. Pioneer shifting cultivation and small-scale agricultural expansion are often itself driven by poverty and food insecurity. In the Philippine island of Mindanao, large corporations in the business of growing fruit such as pineapples and bananas are buying the land from indebted farmers cheaply, with the result that the farmers move to forested land higher up and clear forest illegally (see Box 6.1, Chap. 6).

Further north on the Philippine island of Luzon in the mountainous terrain of the Central Cordillera farmers were encouraged to clear forest and grow vegetables by traders, who supplied seed and fertiliser and took care of the marketing. It was not particularly profitable for the farmers as the traders deducted the cost of the inputs supplied from the relatively low price that they paid to the farmers compared with the price the traders received for the produce. In other countries where land tenure is unclear, companies, often foreign ones, are awarded concessions on land occupied, but not owned, by small farmers, for large-scale cultivation of crops such as rubber, palm oil and sugar. The farmers are forced off the land and frequently move to forest areas to clear more land in order to survive. This is a political issue and is often associated with corruption, with the companies bribing ministers and officials to obtain the concession. Forest clearance, on land due to be flooded as a result of a new dam, is part of the environmental cost of the dam and the electricity or irrigation water that will be produced, but in many cases it also involves resettlement of people who formerly lived in the area to be flooded. That can result in additional forest clearance, if they are moved to higher land that is forested. It is rare to find a detailed plan for the integrated management of the river basin above a dam, which takes account of the needs of resettled communities as well as the protection and management of the steeper sloping land with forest cover to minimise erosion and flash flooding. Mining, especially when opencast, inevitably requires forest to be cleared, and in some countries mining concessions include a requirement both for restoration and sometimes for the establishment or protection of a similar area of forest elsewhere in the country. In principle, these measures are the best that can be expected, but the outcome depends very much on the wording of the concession agreement and on the subsequent enforcement. When mining of coal results in deforestation the user of the coal should be required to offset the carbon dioxide produced when the coal is burnt, by establishing enough forest in the resource country to offset all the emissions.

Illegal Logging

An opencast coalmine in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, was working a seam 3 m thick, which produced about 40,000 tonnes of coal per ha. When burnt, this coal will release about 70,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The current market value of that carbon dioxide is more than US$ 500,000, which is enough to restore about 350 ha of forest with planted trees. Over the next 50 years that forest will sequester about 70,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, thus offsetting the emissions from the coal. The properties of coal vary from place to place, as do the coal seams that are exploited, so these figures are only indicative, but provide an option to both coal users and governments as to how the former can reduce their carbon footprint and the latter might get some forest cover restored. Restoring, what was an area of natural forest, with plantations of an exotic species is not particularly beneficial, but experience in Suriname on the site of a gold-mine that was abandoned in the 1920s, shows that natural forest will recover within 50 years if the area around the mine is left as natural forest and can act as a seed source for the restoration. See Plate 3.1. In Suriname, population density is low and so local farmers did not invade the area when the mine was abandoned, which allowed regeneration to take place slowly. In more crowded countries the land may well have been occupied by farmers looking for somewhere to settle. Although unsustainable logging is considered as a driver of forest degradation, it is also a driver of deforestation, as landless farmers looking for somewhere to settle can also use the access roads constructed for extracting the logs. If the forest is being logged by a concession holding company, which does not own the land, it has little incentive to stop the farmers clearing land nor to prevent illegal logging, since it has no long-term interest in the forest beyond the concession period. Forest degradation can ultimately lead to deforestation, as it is easier to both justify and implement clearing forest that has been reduced to a sparse tree cover. It is generally the result of

21

unsustainable logging in the sense that the intensity of the logging has been too high and/or too frequent, so that the forest cannot recover. Once the growing stock is reduced below a certain limit a tipping point is reached when the growth is less than the losses due to death and decay or further logging. This is illustrated in an example from two pilot management units in Indonesia; one referred to earlier in Jambi and one in Central Kalimantan. In 1995 an inventory was carried out in both the areas, which included areas already harvested as well as the unlogged primary forest. The Jambi forest, which was easily accessible by road, was subject to illegal logging in addition to that which the concession holding company had carried out and the inventory showed that the longer the period since the original logging by the company, the lower was the standing volume. This was due to the fact that local gangs were illegally logging areas that the company had logged a few years previously. In contrast the unit in Kalimantan showed that by about 16  years after initial logging the growing stock had more or less recovered to the same level as found in the unlogged primary forest. The size class distribution of the trees was changed somewhat since most of the very large tree had been felled, but the medium-sized trees had grown well and replaced the volume logged. Unlike in Jambi, the forest was fairly far from population centres and relied on a river to transport logs to the processing factory so that illegal logging was both difficult and easy to detect. By 2006 the forest in Jambi had disappeared.

Illegal Logging Illegal logging is a major issue in many developing countries and is a significant contributor to both deforestation and forest degradation as indicated above. Because of the widespread existence and complexity of the problem it is dealt with in detail in Chap. 10.

22

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

Plate 3.1  Remains of a bucket dredger photographed in 1973, in a gold mine in the forest in Suriname, abandoned in the 1920s, showing the recovery of the forest after 50 years

 roperty Rights and Land P Ownership In many countries, all lands not registered with a title of ownership are claimed by the government as “state” land, even though it may have been occupied, sometimes for generations, by people. When such land is largely covered in forest the government tends to assume that it is “state” forest, even though it does not hold any form of title to the land and has not established any boundaries on the ground to demarcate what is considered as forest. Long established local communities may consider that the land is theirs by tradition and in many cases village elders have been allocating parcels of land to members of the community. Such communities may also be very dependent on the forest for a wide range of non-­ timber products such as food, medicines, bush-­ meat and construction materials. In the Indonesian province of Jambi on the island of Sumatra, the government forestry department had surveyed and demarcated the boundary of the forest management unit referred to above, installing concrete posts at intervals,

each labelled with information on the distance and direction to the next post in either direction. The forest area had been awarded as a concession to a foreign company for logging and about 15 years later was selected as a pilot forest management unit for the Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Project referred to in Chap. 1. On checking the boundary, many posts were found to be missing and several were found in the middle of fields being cultivated by local farmers. When asked if they knew what the posts were for they claimed not to know and said that they had just come across them when clearing the land. That was not really surprising as they had not been informed about, or involved in, the boundary survey a few years previously.

 upply and Demand for Forest S Products While logging is a direct driver of deforestation and forest degradation, national and international markets for timber products are indirect drivers. As long as there is still primary forest that can be,

Market Failure in Forest Products

in effect, mined, the potential supply of logs will exceed the demand, with the result that the stumpage value of most logs is low. There are a few exceptions with valuable species that are now scarce, such as Teak, Rosewood and Ramin, having a very high stumpage value. If Sustainable Forest Management could be enforced and the log supply restricted stumpage values would rise. It would have the additional benefit that higher log prices would encourage greater efficiency in processing, which is currently dismally low in most tropical countries. The enforcement would be both absolutely essential and costly as higher log prices would increase the incentive to log illegally. Unfortunately the Food and Agriculture Organisation global database on production and trade in forest products has many anomalies and appears to have ceased recording trade in logs some years ago. As a result it is difficult to get an accurate overview of the efficiency of the wood processing industry worldwide in terms of the percentage recovery of product volume from a given volume of logs. It is also difficult to put together a complete picture because of the different ways that countries deal with waste. In efficient countries most of the waste from sawmilling, which may be as much as 50% of the log, is either chipped and used to make wood-based panels or pulp or is burnt to heat kilns to dry the sawn-­ wood. In most poor countries, not only does the recovery of product tend to be lower but the waste is just left lying around to rot (Plate 3.2). Looking at the domestic consumption of logs, for two countries with relatively similar populations that are at different stages of development illustrates the general picture. Japan, with a population of about 127 million has an overall recovery rate in sawmilling of hardwoods of 67.2% and conifers of 77%, and consumption of sawn-­ wood of 0.139 cubic metres per caput. In contrast, Nigeria with a population of about 181 million has an overall recovery rate in sawmilling of hardwoods only of 35.8% and consumption of 0.011 cubic metres per caput. The overall recovery rate has been calculated for both countries by dividing the total production of sawn-wood from 1961 to the present by the total domestic con-

23

sumption of sawlogs (production plus imports minus exports) over the same period. Taking the date for such a long period removes variation in the annual figures and reduces the effect of missing or anomalous data. Nigeria uses almost twice the volume of logs to produce its sawn-wood although its people only consume about one-­ tenth of the quantity that the Japanese do. If Nigeria and other developing countries increase their consumption of sawn-wood to levels similar to those found in developed countries, the pressure on the forests will grow enormously and especially if their wood processing industry continues to be so inefficient.

Market Failure in Forest Products The total global growing stock of timber, according to FAO’s 2015 Forest Resource Assessment, is about 480 billion cubic metres, and if only about 20% is suitable as commercial timber it is still about 80  years supply at current levels of consumption. Assuming that annual increment on the growing stock is about 1%, then the annual growth will cover about three quarters of the current demand and so extend the period over which the current growing stock will last. This rather crude analysis shows that there is still apparently a relative abundance of timber on the planet. One consequence of this is that the stumpage value of logs and the market price of wood products generally reflect only the harvesting and post harvesting costs and not the replacement cost. Timber is mined rather than being sustainably harvested. The normal market mechanism that balances supply and demand is generally driven by changes on the demand side due to overall economic circumstances rather than by tightening of the supply. There are a few examples of the latter situation, as mentioned earlier, with some particular species becoming sufficiently rare for prices to rise well above the average. Natural forest in most parts of the world requires 25–40 years to recover from a selective logging operation and even longer from clear felling, before it can be harvested again. During this time it must be protected and monitored and

24

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

Plate 3.2  Simple developing country sawmill with residues everywhere and no regard for health and safety

will almost certainly need some silvicultural interventions such as enrichment planting, climber cutting and selective thinning to restrict undesirable species. All such activities are costs for the owner or manager of the forest, which ideally should have been covered by the revenue from the stumpage for the original harvesting. With generally low stumpage prices the revenue is rarely sufficient to cover these future costs so that new investment must be made, in a similar way to investing in plantations, in the expectation that it will be recovered from the revenue from the next harvest in many years. Because of the long-term nature of forestry operations the financial return on such investments is generally very low in the range of 1–3%. If the future ecological and environmental benefits are taken into account the economic rate of return may be higher, but as these are public benefits it normally requires public investment, and governments are rarely keen to invest public money in long-term ventures with mainly intangible benefits in the future. Some plantations of fast growing species may yield higher returns, but they do not have the eco-

logical and environmental benefits of natural forest. There was a time, during the 1980s especially in the United States of America, when pulp and paper manufacturing corporations were prepared to invest in plantations to provide their raw material, but it involved having a large amount of capital tied up in a low yielding operation. The transfer price for the wood between the plantation and the pulpmill was booked at cost so that the pulping part of the operation looked extremely profitable while the plantations were just cost centres. Most plantations were sold off to forest management companies and in some cases pension funds became involved in providing the long-term funding.

Institutional and Financial Issues When forests are state owned, governments usually rely on the revenue from the stumpage to cover general expenditure rather than for funding forest management costs. Forest Departments often struggle for sufficient funds to cover basic

Institutional and Financial Issues

operating costs and rely on international donors to fund such basic operations as national forest inventories. In some countries responsibility for forestry activities is split between ministries with the production-related matters being separated from the environmental, conservation and forest industry matters. This further reduces the funding available for basic forest management work. Sustainable Forest Management not only involves balancing the harvest with the growth, but also involves taking account of the various ecological and environmental services that forests provide. This means setting aside forest for wildlife and on steep sloping land and river-banks to protect against soil erosion and flash flooding. Within a given forest block there may be some areas that can reasonably be harvested for timber and others that should be left untouched as important habitat for wildlife, and other areas that are needed to protect against soil erosion and flooding. If responsibility for these different functions of forest is split between ministries, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to coordinate the necessary management and silvicultural operations. It usually results in large forested blocks being dedicated to just one of the functions such as conservation, protection or production. This is inefficient since it means that the management focuses on just the one function and tends to ignore or neglect the others. It is also important to avoid excessive fragmentation of forest blocks, which reduces the value for wildlife habitat. It may be necessary to restrict grazing by domestic animals inside forest as it can have a devastating impact on young regeneration. All these activities involve costs and at the moment rarely result in any income from the beneficiaries. It can be very difficult to persuade people that it is better to keep forest on steep slopes, until there is a violent storm followed by flash flooding and landslides. By then the forest has usually gone and cannot be instantly replaced. All these intangible benefits of forests are recognised but it is almost impossible to put a value on them. Achieving Sustainable Forest Management therefore requires considerable financial investment (discussed in more detail in a later chapter). Production forests can generate revenue, some of

25

which private operators may be willing to invest in Sustainable Forest Management in order to gain certification. This can be financially beneficial, but governments more often look on the forests as a source of cash (sometimes for government officials). Forests intended for soil, water and biodiversity conservation generate little revenue unless managed for recreation and tourism, which also requires investment, and so there is little incentive to manage them sustainably. The concept of Payment for Ecological/ Environmental Services (PES) has recently been put forward and has been piloted successfully in a few places. It is very difficult to assess the value of some of the services, especially wildlife habitat and the impact of soil erosion on river and coastal fisheries. The easiest to understand is river basin management above a dam. The long-­ term consequences of soil erosion on the life of the reservoir and the short-term impact of the suspended sediments on hydro-power turbine blades can be quantified and the impact on these operating costs for the utility concerned can be monitored in relation to interventions in the management of the river basin. It will be many years before the level of payments can be justified by the results. In recent years the importance of forests in relation to climate change has been recognised, both as a source of emissions and as a sink to sequester and store carbon. This has given rise to a number of new funding mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Reducing Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus Sustainable Forest Management (REDD+) and the Forest Investment Programme (FIP). While these are to be welcomed they bring with them a number of practical difficulties. First there is the issue of the transaction costs, which can be very high because of the conditions attached to the provision of funds and the need to monitor and verify the results. Second is the issue of who the beneficiaries should be; the national or local government, the local communities or private sector commercial; companies should they have a concession in a forest that is to receive funding. Third is the issue of leakage, whereby a reduction in emissions in one place is cancelled out by new emissions somewhere else, which gives rise to

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

26

arguments between a jurisdictional and a project approach to the monitoring and verification. These issues are currently being explored through pilot activities in many countries.

I s Sustainable Forest Management Possible? Some forests in Europe have been effectively managed to achieve sustainability for a century or more and there are a few examples from the tropics such as the Tapajos National Forest in Brazil (see Box 3.1 below and Bicalho 2011), which is being managed sustainably by local communities more than 40 years after it was established, and it must be hoped that the areas currently designated as Permanent Forest remain as such and are managed in accordance with best practice. That would at least secure about 40% of the forest area for the future although a substantial proportion is likely to be plantations, which have a much lower environmental value than natural forest. Converting natural forest to plantations is not Sustainable Forest Management even if the plantations are managed sustainably for timber supply, but some such conversion may be justified to reduce pressure on natural forest areas for logging allowing lower volumes to be harvested and longer intervals between successive harvests.

Box 3.1 The Tapajos National Forest in Brazil and an Example of Sustainable Forest Management by Communities

The Tapajos National Forest; Brazil In 1965 the Forest Code of Brazil was revised to allow the government to create fully preserved Biological Reserves and National Forests for economic use. The intention was to give logging concessions within the latter to commercial companies and so the government was given the powers to expropriate any private property within a National Forest. The Tapajos National Forest covers 600,000  ha and is located

about 50  km south of Santarem between highway BR 163 and the Tapajos River. In 1978 the Food and Agriculture Organisation sent a team of consultants under a Technical Cooperation Agreement to carry out a pre-feasibility study for the establishment of an integrated wood processing facility to be supplied with logs from the Tapajos National Forest. An inventory had been carried out covering 162,000 ha in the north-eastern part of the national forest. About a half of the inventoried area is relatively flat with denser forest cover and the other half is on more dissected terrain with smaller trees and lower stocking density. The area to the west of the inventoried forest slopes steeply down towards the river, which is bordered with seasonally flooded forest. The consultant team examined the inventory data (Fraser 1978) and found that it had several serious shortcomings in the design and execution, and so made very conservative estimates of the potential sustainable harvest. It was considered that the forest could supply around 150,000 cubic metres annually for the next 20 years assuming a harvest of about 25 cubic metres per ha, but that it would only be possible to sustain that level of harvest beyond 20 years if a substantial silvicultural programme of climber cutting, cleaning to release young regeneration and some enrichment planting was carried out. The annual cost of the silvicultural operations for the next 40 years was estimated to be around US$ 590,000 plus US$ 400,000 for management overheads or almost US$ 6 per cubic metre harvested. The silvicultural cess, which in effect is the stumpage, of US$ 1.80 per cubic metre was clearly inadequate to cover the silvicultural costs. Recent studies by Van Gardingen et  al. (2006) on yield regulation using a growth model concluded that only yields as low as 10 cubic metres per ha on a 30 year cycle or 20 cubic metres per ha on a 60 year cycle would be sustainable. (continued)

Is Sustainable Forest Management Possible?

At the time of its creation there were 18 communities with a population of more than 2000 persons living within the area declared as National Forest. These included a number of traditional riverside communities that had lived in the area for generations and more recent settlers from outside the area. These communities strongly resisted eviction and over the following 30 years they fought hard to resist all attempts at evicting them. Initially they formed themselves into a number of formal groups that gradually came together and in 2005 they all merged into a single Cooperative that was legally recognised and negotiated to undertake the management of the whole forest, including harvesting and regeneration. The Federal Forestry Agency supervised inventories and a wide range of research activities and divided the area into a number of zones with a core fully protected area, a 10 km wide buffer zone around the perimeter and a 32,000 ha zone for harvesting. There were also areas set aside for residents and an ecological corridor. After a prolonged struggle which included the gradual merging of all community organisations into a single one, the government agreed to the local communities taking over the management of the forest (Bicalho 2011). They plan to open a small sawmill. The Community Cooperative now manages all operations, including Low Impact Logging and replanting of degraded and denuded areas and employs more than 55 people. It is also developing a wide range

27

of additional revenue generating enterprises, including furniture making, wooden and latex handicrafts, honey production, Brazil nut harvesting and Ecotourism. The experience demonstrates that communities are capable of implementing sustainable forest management and that allowing them to do so gives them the incentive to protect and nurture the forest. Judging from posts on the Internet the Tapajos national Forest has now become quite a tourist attraction as well as a centre of research in the Amazon.

Once Primary forest is lost it is almost impossible to replace it at a bearable cost, especially in the tropics. As mentioned above with reference to Suriname, natural forest may recover, initially as secondary forest dominated by pioneer species, but over time some climax species may be able to re-establish themselves and create a more diverse species composition, but that is dependent on seed from surrounding areas and will take a very long time. If the forest is fragmented regeneration is more difficult and less attractive as habitat for animals and insects that are crucial for seed dispersal. The various issues that have been discussed above are summarised in the Problem Tree Analysis below (Fig. 3.6). The basic problem of “Insufficient forest being managed sustainably” is in the centre, with the root causes below and the consequences of those issues above. It provides a framework for tackling the problem and shows that it must be dealt with on many fronts. There is no silver bullet to solve the problem.

3  The Current Status of Sustainably Managed Forests

28

Forest Institutions weak or fragmented

Increased risk of flash flooding

Loss of habitat

Overcutting & illegal logging

Encroachment Forest issues not given legislative priority

Lack of respect by some stakeholders

Lack of incentive to protect & manage forest Poor quality inventory & protection

Failure to sustain effort & funding for SFM

FOCUS PROBLEM Not enough Forest managed sustainably

Lack of Political Will

Lack of appropriate legal framework Lack of clearly defined forest boundaries

Lack of funds

Lack of trained HR

Corruption

Lack of consultation with local communities

Lack of funds for forest management Excess of demand over supply of timber

High opportunity cost of retaining forest

Fig. 3.6  Problem tree analysis for the lack of forest being managed sustainably

Shorttermism

Inadequate methodology for valuing forest products and services

Low carbon price

Part II Institutional Issues

4

Policy and the Political Will

 he Politics of Sustainable Forest T Management In most countries, forestry is very low down in the list of political priorities and it is difficult to catch the attention of the political decision makers. There are a few examples where an influential person has successfully lobbied for some action with regard to forests. In Vietnam it was reported that the decision to launch the 5 million ha tree-planting programme was the result of strong lobbying by an influential retired general. In the Republic of Korea, it was reported that the President insisted on a major reforestation programme after seeing the situation on the ground from the air while returning from an overseas visit. In the United Kingdom, it was an influential newspaper owner with strong political ties that lobbied hard together with other influential figures, for the Forestry Commission to get funds for extensive plantations after the Second World War. These three examples, that were described to the author while working in the countries concerned, show that the people who advocated action were not foresters but had political influence via other channels, while having a personal interest and belief in the benefits of having forests for the future. Without such support it is likely that little would have been done to promote the reforestation.

Only in a very few countries is the head of the forestry organisation at Ministerial level with a voice in political decision-making and even then there are other Ministries such as Internal and External Affairs, Finance and Defence and even Agriculture whose voice and opinions will be considered more important. In most countries the Head of the forestry organisation is at Director-­ General or Director level and increasingly governments are splitting responsibility for forestry between Ministries with conservation issues and timber production separated. This weakens the influence of both organisations and may even result in conflict and competition for funding between them. A Government’s commitment to achieving sustainable forest management can be judged by the status and organisational structure that it gives to the Forest Authority. In Malaysia the government established the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) in 1956, by the Land Development Act and charged it with establishing new settlements for rural landless poor farmers to grow oil palm and rubber. By 1990 the organisation had achieved the objectives that it was set and had built up the business to the extent that it could be self-financing. Similarly the United Kingdom government established the Forestry Commission in 1919 to restore the nation’s forests, which had been heavily depleted over a long period and especially during the First World War. Despite a rocky start due to financing

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_4

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issues it went on to achieve the purpose for which it was established. These two examples show how a dedicated body with a clear mandate can get things done, and achieving sustainable forest management requires a similar approach with responsibility for all aspects of forestry together in one Authority. Another source of influence in the political arena is public opinion. Some political systems do not generally welcome grass roots activism, but forestry may be an exception because it does not threaten political stability. Many regimes have “forestry” or “tree planting” days that can be used to raise public awareness and the political profile of forestry. Sustainable Forest Management involves difficult decisions balancing the short-term against the longer-term considerations and usually means some sacrifice today for something better tomorrow. This means that in the short term there will be some losers. These may be local communities that either need land to cultivate or had relied on receiving royalties on logs harvested from their forest that were diverted to be used for local development. It may be commercial timber companies that have to reduce the volumes they harvest or it could be the government that suffers a reduction in revenue needed for national development. There needs to be discussion and consensus building among stakeholders to determine who the losers will be and how best they might be compensated. Some options are discussed later in the chapter. The media, especially television, and nowadays social media are a good way of raising awareness amongst the public of the benefits that forests provide and the importance of maintaining forest cover, especially on critical areas of steep slopes, and in sufficiently large blocks to preserve the habitat of important wildlife. In democracies members of the public can make their views known through their members of parliament and in more centralised systems there are still channels through which grass root opinion can be expressed such as via appointed Village chiefs who have the ear of government officials at

4  Policy and the Political Will

higher levels. Non-government organisations may also be able to play a role in raising awareness of the issues and mobilising public support for action. The more that the public understands what Sustainable Forest Management is all about and the more that the issues of costs and benefits and short and long-term considerations are discussed, the more likely it is that the political will to take action will develop. Foresters need to develop alliances with other sectors that stand to benefit from forests that are managed sustainably. Agriculture will benefit from less soil erosion and therefore higher productivity if forest cover is maintained on critical sites, especially steep slopes, river-banks and unstable ground that may be prone to landslides. The fishery sector, both inland in rivers and lakes and in coastal waters where fish farming may be practised, can benefit from less suspended solids in the water from erosion as well as from shade and nutrients from trees on river banks and lakeshores. The transport and energy sectors can benefit from the sequestration of carbon by trees to offset emissions that may be hard to reduce in the short term and small roadside woodlands and even larger forest blocks can offer an attractive environment for service facilities. The military may have interests in forestry if the country has land borders that are heavily forested and in some countries these interests are commercial as well as technical. The construction and housing sector have interests in the long-­ term supply of quality timber. Tourism is another sector where forests can bring benefits, not just for ecotourism, but for maintaining an attractive landscape and providing opportunities for sports and recreation. If the forest sector, which includes the forest authority as well as others directly dependent on forests such as the wood industry, forest owners, local communities, workers in the sector and NGOs concerned with conservation and related issues, are to build the political will to really achieve Sustainable Forest Management, it needs to reach out to these other sectors and seek their support.

The Need to Achieve Consensus Among Stakeholders

 he Benefits of Managing Forest T Resources Sustainably People like to talk about forests and timber as being a Renewable resource, but this is only true if they are managed appropriately. A forest block that is being managed sustainably does not appear different from one that is not being so managed in the short term. The difference only becomes apparent at some point in the future when the former is still a good forest providing all the products and services that we expect from forests and the latter has either disappeared or is reduced to scrubland with little use and few benefits. If all the measures being discussed to combat climate change fail to achieve the goal of keeping the increase in global temperature below 2 °C, human society will be glad to have forests to mitigate some of the potential environmental disasters caused by weather extremes. The current awareness of the negative impact on the oceanic environment around the world of cheap disposable plastic has stimulated renewed interest in using paper products for packaging, which will mean that demand for wood fibre may increase along with more pressure to cut trees. The human population is becoming steadily more urbanised, which may gradually reduce the pressure to keep clearing forest and if the experience of the rich developed countries is followed, as poorer developing countries catch up, the demand for forests for recreation and leisure purposes will increase. Future generations are likely to appreciate forests that are in good shape and have been around for a long time. These concepts are a hard sell for politicians and foresters at the present, when there are so many other priorities to improve human welfare.

 he Need to Achieve Consensus T Among Stakeholders There are very many stakeholders in the sustainable management of forest, which include national and local government, local communities especially ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples that rely on forests for much of their live-

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lihood, conservation and environmental groups, private sector companies involved in forest products, recreation and tourism, utilities operating hydro-power and irrigation facilities, individual fishers and fishing and fish farming companies, middle class urban dwellers that enjoy visits to forest areas, and international tourists who want to travel and stay in the countryside as well as just visiting cities. Vulchic et al. (2006) showed that local and foreign tourists to a forested island in Croatia were prepared to pay between 1.5 and 3.5% additional accommodation charge if the proceeds went towards protecting and managing the forests on the island. Collectively these various groups represent a sizeable proportion of the population, but they may not all share the same values and ideas about forests and do not have the opportunity to share their views both within their groups and among the different groups. Macura et al. (2011) found that in India the attitude of local communities towards the Joint Management of Forests policy, that was intended to involve them in manageing local forests, was coloured by negative feelings towards Forest Department staff. However, better knowledge about the recently promulgated Forest Law that improved their rights mitigated some of the mistrust. Also in India, in the lower Himalaya region surveys reported by Ruchi (1998) found antagonism towards Forest Department staff, but a general understanding and support for conservation measures. However, these positive attitudes did not go as far as ceasing the collection of fuelwood and other forest products in the local forest which they depended on for their livelihood, even though they recognised that it is not sustainable. Practical necessity beats emotional good intentions. In Ecuador, Becker and Ghimire (2003) found that a foreign-based conservation organisation that had become involved with the local community in managing their forest was able to convince the community to modify their practices by educating them about the current scientific knowledge on the relationship between forests and water conservation. In the southern United States of America, Tarrant and Cordell (2002) surveyed attitudes towards utilitarian (timber production), life support, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of forests and

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found that they varied with age, gender and racial background. Younger people, females and white people attached less value to the utilitarian aspects of forest management than the other attributes. In British Columbia, Hershaw et  al. (2009) found that Public Advisory Groups set up by the Forest Department did not capture the full range of opinions within the local population and there was a large Silent majority whose opinions were not taken into account. There is a tendency everywhere for activists to set the agenda and capture the debate without themselves canvassing a wider public for their views. In Scandinavia, Gunderson and Frivold (2008) reviewed a large number of surveys and found that most people preferred older forests of mixed species and age classes and did not appreciate large sale operations that changed the nature of the forest such as clear felling. These various surveys show that raising awareness of forestry issues is vital to ensure informed public attitudes towards the management of forests. They also show that consultation with a few “representative” groups will not be enough to ensure support for achieving the trade-­offs between the short and long term that will be essential if forests are to be managed sustainably. To develop the “Political Will” to take the necessary action to achieve sustainable management of forests there needs to be a much wider and more vocal expression of public attitude towards the difficult decisions that will be necessary. Balancing the needs of the short term against the desires for the long term is very difficult to get right.

 orest Policy and the Instruments F to Implement It MacDicken et al. (2015) review the information provided in the 2015 Global Forest Resource Assessment and finds that about 97% of the area that has been declared as Permanent Forest is covered by forest policy and a legal framework that supports Sustainable Forest Management. However, this proportion falls to less than 20% when all the other basic requirements for sustainable forest management, such as inventories and management plans, are taken into account. With

4  Policy and the Political Will

about 1.66 billion ha of forest declared as Permanent, this means that only about 300 million ha are covered by all the measures necessary to achieve sustainability. This is somewhat less than the 500 million ha of forest that has been declared as “Certified” by FSC and PEFC.  The difference may be accounted for by the fact that some forest has been certified by both organisations and some of the certified forest may actually be permanent but nor officially declared as such. For example, most of the forests in the United Kingdom are in effect permanent and are certified but are not reported to FAO as being a Permanent Forest Estate. The governments of each country provide the information contained in the Global Forest Resource Assessment. Countries vary in their definitions of forest, in the scope of their forest policy and in the details of their legal framework. For some countries policy is very detailed, while in others it is very brief. Similarly with the legal framework, some countries have very detailed and prescriptive forest laws, while others delegate powers to a specified forest authority that is empowered to issue regulations. A review of the statements on forest policy in the R-PPs of a number of countries reveals a wide range of approaches. These range from a very lengthy and detailed 63 page document on Forest Policy such as that for Papua New Guinea, which also includes sustainable resource management in its Constitution, through a succinct statement as in Cameroon, to no specific forest policy statement as in Costa Rica. Some countries rely on a Forestry Code that mainly deals with the use and exploitation of the resource such as that in Cote D’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Cameroon statement is “perpetuate and develop the economic, ecological and social functions of forests within the framework of ­participatory management capable of sustainably and durably ensuring the conservation and use of the resources of the ecosystem”. In between these extremes a number of countries express policy as a series of statements that are more like policy goals. In Indonesia there are five such policy goals:

The Politics of Land-Use and Ownership

• controlling illegal logging and trade in forest products, • forest sector restructuring to include timber plantations and the wood processing industry, • forest rehabilitation and conservation, • strengthening the economy of local communities and • securing the forest areas. Nigeria has a similar set of statements: • increase and enhance the forest estate through sound forest management, • address the underlying causes of deforestation, forest degradation and desertification, • promote private sector involvement and a positive investment environment, • support schemes to promote access to carbon markets and • encourage forest-dependent people and local communities to improve their livelihoods through improved forestry practices.

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None of these policies seems to have resulted in a cessation of deforestation and forest degradation so that it must be concluded that it is the implementation of policy and the enforcement of forest and other Laws that is at the root of the problem.

 he Politics of Land-Use T and Ownership

In most developing countries land ownership and land-use is a highly political topic. At the local level there are often conflicts between communities that have lived in an area and worked the land for generations and “outsiders” such as migrants from other parts of the country or commercial companies looking for land to raise crops or livestock. When the land is covered in forest there are also likely to be logging companies keen to get hold of the timber resources. At a higher level there are often conflicts between government departments over who has jurisdiction over land-­ Vietnam’s statements are incorporated into a use decisions, with agriculture and forestry Strategy for Industrialisation and modernisation: departments often at odds with each other and with other stakeholders in land, such as conserva• increase forest cover to 43% by 2010, tionists, and potential users of land, such as • complete the programme of land allocation to hydro-power operators, urban developers, road households, builders and mining companies. • promote forest-based livelihoods, In many countries attempts are made to resolve • protect 10 million ha of natural forest through these conflicts through land-use planning, which management contracts and determines how best to allocate the land to differ• accelerate the development of plantations. ent uses. In some countries this has been a very top-down process with government basically It is also clear from the discussion on forest deciding which land should be used for what purpolicy issues in most countries that there are fre- pose. More recently internationally funded develquently conflicts between forestry policy and opment projects and NGO’s have developed a policies of other sectors such as agriculture, land-­ more bottom-up approach, with a strong reliance use, mining and energy. on stakeholder participation and inputs of local In a few countries that do not have specific knowledge and experience. This latter approach forestry policies the Forest Law is essentially the has been driven by concerns over the tendency for policy statement setting out what can and cannot the needs and views of local communities to be be done and by whom. In others the forest area is ignored in the top-down process, which is often divided up according to the primary function, i.e. more about competition between agencies rather production, conservation and protection each than any technical, social, environmental or ecowith a separate policy and in many cases with a nomic assessment of the optimal use for each separate institution being responsible for the piece of land. management.

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An example of the top-down approach can be seen in the “Spatial Planning” Law (Tata Ruang), in Indonesia, which required the government to define the broad use of all land that has not already been alienated and titled. See Box 4.1 below for more details. It is a highly political issue as different government departments and land using interests compete to control access to land. The spatial planning was directed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, but the Forestry Department claimed jurisdiction over all “forest” land in accordance with the Basic Forest Law of 1967. Non “forest” land is regulated under the earlier 1960 Agrarian Reform Act, which declared all land not titled at the time to be “state” land and established the National Land Agency (Badan Pertanahan Nasional) to survey and register titles to land. As population pressure grows governments need to consider how best to use the nation’s land to achieve a balance between food production and other uses such as urban development, infrastructure, mining, forest and wilderness. Land Laws vary enormously between countries but cover two broad issues, that is ownership of land and use of land. In most developed countries the ownership of land is well established and titles are registered showing precisely the extent of the land under an individual ownership. Laws may restrict who can own land with some jurisdictions excluding foreigners from owning land and the laws usually cover the government’s powers to “expropriate” land for public purposes. Once land ownership is widely established and owners possess a legal instrument such as a title, the land acquires a value and a market for land will develop, which tends to ensure the efficient use of the land. However, when such land is forest the market usually fails resulting in the clearance of forests in favour of short-term profit from an alternative use of the land, ignoring any long-term social, ecological or environmental costs. In most developed countries Laws have been introduced over the past century or so placing restrictions on the clearance of forest on privately owned land. Land-use planning should include Strategic Environmental Assessments and Biodiversity planning to take

4  Policy and the Political Will

account of the impact on habitats of alternative land-uses and consider the need for biodiversity corridors to enable wildlife to migrate between small blocks of forest or woodland. In developing countries the situation is usually much more complex. In countries formerly colonised, the colonising power often declared all land as state land, except any that might have been formally recognised as being owned under any pre-existing local law. Such declarations usually did not recognise customary or traditional land ownership by communities that had been occupying the land, sometimes for many generations. On independence most countries just continued to consider most land as being state land, which was generally interpreted as owned by the government to do what they liked with it. Much of such state land is in parts of the country that are more remote and therefore difficult to access, and is covered in forest. The communities living in such areas were often of a different ethnic group to the inhabitants of the accessible areas and having little contact with the colonising and Box 4.1 Land-Use Planning in Indonesia as an Example of a Top-Down Approach

Land-Use Planning in Indonesia Land-use planning in Indonesia has been through several phases and has been influenced by the Basic Forestry Law of 1967, which gave the Ministry of Forestry jurisdiction over all forest-land. The earlier Agrarian Reform Law of 1960 therefore was reduced to dealing just with all non-­ forest land. The Ministry of Home Affairs initiated Spatial Planning (tata ruang) in 1982 by instructing the Ministry of Forestry to undertake land-use planning by consensus to integrate plans for forest-land with other plans for land-use at the provincial level. The consensus was however between government departments and provincial governments and not local communities. This process defined the land that the Ministry of Forestry considered to be “forest” land as opposed to “agricultural” land (continued)

The Politics of Land-Use and Ownership

and land for other purposes such as urban or industrial development. In 1999 the total area of “forest-land” was 112 million ha or 58.5% of the national land area. 22.7 million ha of the “forest” land were designated as “conversion forest land” and were expected to be converted to another use sometime in the future, generally on the flattest and most accessible land. The remaining “forest” land was then considered to be permanent forests and was divided into “production”, “limited production forest” and “protection forest” on progressively more remote and hilly or mountainous land. There is also “Conservation forest” consisting of areas considered suitable as National Parks, Nature Reserves or Wildlife Sanctuaries. The boundaries of these different forest functions were drawn on maps at a scale of 1,500,000, which were not very accurate, especially in the more remote parts of the country. They also took no account of any existing population settlements and current land-use at the local level. The Ministry of Forestry initiated a programme to mark the boundaries on the ground. The process subsequently went through a number of further adaptations partly in response to disagreements about the initial plans and partly in response to other political developments that decentralised many powers to Provincial and District Government. Wollenberg et al. (2008) give a more detailed account of the subsequent development of the land-use planning system in Indonesia and the experience of a project aiming to implement a more interactive planning process involving local communities. The issue of land ownership was dealt with under the 1960 Agrarian Reform Law, which included a system for registration of land ownership now handled by the National Land Office (Badan Pertanahan Nasional) which is empowered to issue title that confirms ownership. The Law states that all land that is not registered is

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state land and the government can transfer ownership to individuals. The issue of registration, however, does not apply to “forest” land, which is considered to be in State ownership and not in need of registration, despite the fact that it often overlaps land that has been used by local communities, often for generations. The government has recently issued a decree to complete the registration of all land by 2025, but this does not apply to “forest” land. The Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Programme, which was implemented between 1991 and 1999, supported the creation of five Forest Management Units (referred to by their Indonesian name of Kesatuan Pengelolaan Hutan Produksi KPHP). These covered production forest areas and were based on existing logging concessions that had been awarded 10–15  years earlier, and involved, among other things, surveying the external boundaries in negotiation with local communities and excluding land that they already used plus modest additions to meet anticipated future needs. Based on the experience from the five pilot units an estimate was made of the likely number and size of Forest Management Units throughout the country and the number of local communities that were likely to be associated with each of them. The 27 provinces, at the time, were assigned to one of three groups according to the proportion of forest cover, with eight having more than 50% forest cover, eleven having less than 30% forest cover and the other eight having more than 30% and less than 50%. The results are shown in the table below which clearly shows the tendency for forest cover to decrease with population density and the size of villages to increase. While the number and size of the average management unit also decreased with decreasing forest cover, the number of communities associated with each unit remained in the range 10–12. (continued)

4  Policy and the Political Will

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Forest cover % Population density (per/km2) Persons per village Average forest area/Province (mill. ha.) Average no. “forest villages”/Province Average no. FMU per Province Average area of Mgmt. Units (ha) Average no. “forest villages”/FMU Average population of “forest villages”/Prov. Population % using local mother tongue

8 Provinces >50% 23.07 1301 5.74 446 44 130,454 10 576,725 87.39

In the provinces with low forest cover many of the villages, though called “forest villages”, were no longer in or near forest. The average household was five persons and required about 1.5  ha of land to have food security so that the ten villages in the densely forested Provinces required about 4000 ha of land, which could easily be excised from the unit without affecting its viability. However, in the sparsely forested Provinces the area required by each village was about 850  ha which in total comes to more than a half of the area of forest in each management unit resulting in very small forest management units, which would be uneconomic to manage for commercial timber production. However, there would be other forest in these Provinces, classified for protection or conservation, and it would be appropriate to consider blocks of

later the national authorities, their claims to the land were either not heard or were just ignored. In Cameroon the revision of the Forest Code in 1994 gave the government the power to carry out forest zoning and conferred the legal status of State ownership on the areas declared as part of the Permanent Forest Estate. Small areas of forest use for other specified purposes could also be included as part of the Permanent Forest Estate but ownership was vested in a local community. The approach differed from that in Indonesia, in that the zoning determined the extent and location of the Permanent Forest Estate, within which areas were set aside primarily for production,

8 Provinces 30–50% 60.80 1595 1.54 263 21 75,952 12 342,997 72.24

11 Provinces 100 years) across much of the globe from the analysis of data from large river basins mentioned above. Globally, very dry areas have more than doubled since the 1970s due to a combination of ENSO events and surface warming, while very wet areas declined by about 5%, with precipitation as the major contributing factor during the early 1980s and temperature more important thereafter (Dai et  al. 2004). The areas of increasing wetness include the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes and equatorial regions. Documented trends in severe droughts and heavy rains show that hydrological conditions are becoming more intense in some regions, consistent with other findings (Trenberth et al. 2007). It would appear to be very likely that there will be changes in the rainfall patterns associated with climate change, though it is too early to say what form these will take. The widespread impact of an ENSO event demonstrates the global nature of  the interactions that take place. Rainfall patterns can be affected in several ways, ranging from changes in the total annual precipitation, through changes in its distribution throughout the year, to changes in the intensity of rainfall events. Adverse changes would be reduced rainfall, shorter rainfall season and more variable rainfall with longer dry spells and more intensive downpours when it does rain. Each of these would impact significantly on the energy (hydro-­ power) and Agriculture and Natural Resources (irrigation and crop productivity) sectors with consequential economic costs and impact on food security. Forests could be affected in areas where changes in the seasonal variation of rainfall result in prolonged dry seasons. This would not only impact on the growth of forests, especially the semi-deciduous subtropical forest, but could also reduce the length of the planting season for tree plantations. Any negative impact on forests will have knock-on impacts on other sectors as already discussed.

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Distribution of Agro-ecological Zones Changes in climate will affect temperature regimes as well as rainfall, and already there have been detectable changes in such phenomena as the timing of leaf and flower opening in response to warmer temperatures at higher latitudes. While the climate at higher latitudes and altitudes is likely to become more favourable, with longer and warmer growing seasons, at lower latitudes and altitudes increased temperature and higher evapo-transpiration is expected to offset any small gains from higher CO2 concentrations. Nemani et  al. (2003) studied the distribution of estimated changes in net primary production between 1982 and 1999, and found several places in the tropics and sub-tropics had experienced a decrease of around 1% per year, while other regions had shown a slight increase. However, studies in the Philippines on rice yields since 1979 have suggested that there has been a significant decrease associated with a 0.35  °C rise in the maximum temperature (Peng et  al. 2004). In the humid evergreen tropical forest in Costa Rica, annual growth from 1984 to 2000 was shown to vary inversely with the annual mean of daily minimum temperature, because of increased respiration at night (Clark et al. 2015). Dong et  al. (2012) studied tree growth rates in four tropical forests in Central and South America and Southeast Asia and concluded that a combination of variation in solar radiation and night-time temperature accounted for much of the observed variation in growth trends and could explain contradictions between locations. Recent reviews of wildlife responses to climate change have noted a large number of different adaptive responses among insects, birds and mammals in many parts of the world, including such things as changes in the plants preferred for egg laying and feeding of butterflies, prolonged development time through changed responses to day length in the pitcher-plant mosquito, extended over-wintering range northwards by the blackcap warbler, insects expanding their ranges, genetic changes in Drosophila melanogaster in eastern coastal Australia over 20 years in response to

8  Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change

increasingly warmer and drier conditions and the timing of reproduction in North American red squirrels. Similar responses are likely to be going on in many ecosystems, and because of the strong inter-linkages between the many species, adaptive changes in one species are likely to result in changes in others. At the present time there seems to be little research into the impact of climate change on nutrient cycling in forests, but increased temperature is likely to result in more rapid decomposition of litter. Apart from the direct impact on the growth of crops from changes in climatic conditions, other indirect consequences have been detected such as changes in pasture quality affecting livestock productivity, changes in the distribution of pests and diseases and their natural predators and increases in the intensity and frequency of wildfires. Each of these changes can be in either direction and may be beneficial in some areas and have adverse consequences in others. Changes in the distribution of agro-ecological zones are only likely to have an impact on the energy sector to the extent that climate change may affect the distribution, extent and productivity of crops grown for bio-fuel. It seems likely that with some agricultural crops becoming more marginal, that food crops may be replaced with fuel crops in some areas, including crops of tree and woody shrub species. The climatic changes that lead to changes in the distribution of agro-­ ecological zones will have an impact on biodiversity, through changes in the species composition of some forests. This may have some impact on the tourism sector should there be significant loss of some of the most attractive habitats and their species. It is the agriculture sector and the potential impact on food security that is of greatest concern, should the expected changes take place. It will mean that crops will tend to fail or become un-commercial where conditions are currently marginal for their production, while the conditions where they can be grown successfully may develop in other areas that have become marginal for other crops. Temperate crops, such as potatoes and vegetables may be able to be grown at higher elevations, while crops currently

The Contribution of Forests to Solving the Problem

confined to the lowlands may be able to be grown on slightly higher land. All these possibilities could impact on forests either through land being abandoned as no longer suitable for agriculture giving opportunities for reforestation or by increasing the pressure to clear more forest. Unfortunately, abandoned agricultural land cannot easily be restored to a condition close to that of natural forest, especially in the tropics. Some pests and diseases may increase and reduce overall productivity, and should there be serious outbreaks of disease affecting crops or livestock it may be necessary to impose restrictions on movement of produce that would impact on the transport sector. Overall, the net effect at least in the short term may not be very marked, but for individual farmers it may entail changing to different crops, learning new skills and adapting to a different types of farming. Governments therefore need to be monitoring climatic changes and developing strategies to adapt that include preparing the farmers and foresters to cope with the new conditions.

 he Contribution of Forests T to Solving the Problem The discussion so far has been about the contribution that forests make to climate change through the emission of carbon dioxide and the possible impacts of climate change on forests and related sectors, most of which are negative. However, as shown in the first section above, forests can contribute to solving the problem by sequestering carbon dioxide. There is a potential not only to eliminate the emissions that come from deforestation and forest degradation but to make a net contribution to reducing carbon dioxide concentrations by sequestering more than is emitted; a form of carbon capture and storage (CCS) that does not rely on sophisticated technology. Data on the growth rates of natural forest especially in the tropics are very limited, but models such as SYMFOR have been developed to help in determining the sustainable harvest from tropical forests. Azevedo et al. (2008) used

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the model to simulate a range of forest management strategies for forest in the Amazon and concluded that a harvest of 30 cubic metres per ha on a 30-year cutting cycle would be sustainable. This implies an annual growth rate slightly in excess of 1 cubic metre per ha. Rivera et  al. (2008) studied the response of forests in Argentina to Low impact logging compared with conventional logging and found that the forest recovered more rapidly after the Low impact logging as well as having less damage and a better species composition. The FAO statistics quoted above on the quantities of carbon dioxide that are sequestered by forests are based on increases in the carbon stock density over time in forests that have not changed. They show an annual average of 2.1 billion tonnes over the 5-year period from 2010 to 2015, of which 0.91 billion tonnes are by plantations and the balance of 1.19 billion tonnes must be from natural forest. The areas of plantations and unchanged natural forest were 277 million ha and 3685 million ha, respectively, between 2010 and 2015, which implies a sequestration of 3.3 tonnes per ha by plantations and 0.32 tonnes per ha by natural forest. Federico et al. (2015) have also estimated the emissions resulting from forest degradation by using the change in the carbon stock density over a period and the area of the forest that has remained unchanged during the same period. When the carbon stock density has declined it means that the forest has been degraded and has created emissions. If the carbon stock density has increased, then it means that growth has taken place and the forest has sequestered carbon dioxide. Using this approach they have estimated that forest degradation has resulted in emissions of about 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually during the period from 2011 to 2015. With total estimated emissions of CO2 at 2.9 billion tonnes it means that forest degradation is accounting for almost one third of the total. Thus if forest degradation could be avoided, forests would become a net sink for carbon dioxide. Forest degradation also reduces the ability of forests to sequester carbon dioxide as like having

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capital in a bank; if it is reduced, the interest payments are also reduced. The conversion of woody material to carbon dioxide varies according to the density of the wood and to some extent its chemical composition so that conversion factors are subject to a degree of variation. Most forest inventories measure the stem volume of the trees and provide a measure of the commercial timber that is in the forest. In order to estimate the carbon stocks and hence the emissions and sequestration of carbon dioxide it is first necessary to estimate the total amount of biomass in the trees which must include the branches, twigs, leaves and roots. For a few species in a few countries allometric equations have been developed that enable the total biomass to be estimated from measurements of tree diameter and height. If these are not available, then estimates have to be based on conversion factors. The most important conversion factor is the Biomass Conversion and Extension Factor (BCEF), which converts measured stem volume into an estimate of the total biomass in the whole tree including branches and roots. However, the BCEF is itself dependent on a number of factors especially the wood density and the local growing conditions such as soil and climate and varies widely with species, the age of the trees and the stocking density (distance between trees). The BCEF includes the roots, and so to separate the above and below-ground biomass, it is necessary to apply a factor for the root/shoot ratio. This also varies considerably according to soil conditions, being much lower on fertile soils (i.e. less root weight per unit of stem and branch weight) (Fraser and Gardiner 1967). Assuming a reasonable average air dry density for wood of 500 g per cubic metre and a Biomass Conversion and Extension Factor of 1.7 gives 0.85 tonnes of above ground biomass per cubic metre of log volume overbark. Root shoot ratios vary from 0.2 to 0.6, so that total biomass per cubic metre of stem wood could be around 1 tonne, which means that 3.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide are either sequestered in creating every cubic metre of stem wood in a tree or are emitted if the wood is burnt to ash or decays. The root

8  Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change

part of the tree is unlikely to be burnt and will decay over a number of years. Thus the figures from FAO imply an annual growth rate of plantations of about 1 cubic metre per ha per annum and natural forest of about 0.1 cubic metre per ha per  annum. These figures suggest that there is scope for increasing the amount of sequestration from forests. Guidance on estimating carbon stocks in tropical forests is given in GOFC-GOLD (2014). Reducing degradation of the natural forest will be vital for increasing carbon dioxide sequestration, as reduction in the growing stock has a negative impact on increment. A small reduction in the growing stock in primary forest by selective logging can stimulate the growth in the smaller residual trees so that over time the growing stock will return to something near its original state. The use of reduced impact logging to reduce the damage to the residual trees is an essential positive contributory factor. However, further interventions before the growing stock has recovered, such as illegal logging, which is usually very damaging, will reduce the potential increment still further through a combination of damage to the residual trees and a reduction in the number of trees that are at or near the size with the maximum growth rate. It is generally believed that old growth forests that have never been disturbed are more or less in a state of equilibrium with growth balancing mortality and decay. Studies reported by Field and Kaduk (2004) for old growth forest in the western USA support this view and suggest that net primary production is in the range 1.5–1.9 tonnes C per year during periods when mortality has reduced the carbon stock. However, old growth forests are important as a stock of carbon and as a reservoir for biodiversity. McMahon et al. (2010) studied growth rates of deciduous forests in the Eastern USA and found evidence that growth rates had increased in recent years, which they attributed to the effect of climate change and increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The theory is given some support by studies by Delucia et al. (1999) who artificially increased carbon dioxide in a pine plantation by 200 ppm (almost a 50%

Incentives for Avoiding Deforestation and Forest Degradation

increase) and found that net primary production increased by about 25%. Cao et al. (2016) studied net primary production in secondary dry tropical forest at three stages of development and found that the net primary production increased from about 3.2 tonnes of carbon per ha in the early stage to about 8.9 tonnes of carbon per ha at the intermediary stage and then declined to about 7.6 tonnes of carbon per ha in the late stage. This is considerably different from the figures reported by Matsumoto (2010) for secondary forest regrowth after shifting cultivation in Lao PDR of 9.4 tonnes carbon per ha per  annum in the second year, declining thereafter to 2.3 tonnes carbon per ha per annum after 20 years. However, in Lao PDR the former shifting cultivation areas are at high elevations and this may account for the differences. It is clear from the FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment that the current forest resource is insufficient to sequester even the emissions from forests and forest land-use changes, let alone contribute to mitigating the impact of emissions from other parts of the global economy. However the difference is not great and if deforestation and forest degradation could be halted and the area of plantations increased even modestly, it would appear that forests could make an important contribution to stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Incentives for Avoiding Deforestation and Forest Degradation In Chap. 3, the main drivers of deforestation and forest degradation were discussed and identified as: (1) large-scale agricultural expansion for cash crops such as oil palm, rubber, corn, sugar and livestock, especially cattle; (2) small-scale agricultural expansion by small farmers and shifting cultivators; (3) infrastructure development such as dams, roads and housing, (4) mining and (5) unsustainable harvesting of logs for timber and of fuelwood. All of these are in turn driven by a combination of population and

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economic growth, which is fuelling demand for all commodities. Since neither population nor economic growth is likely to stop any time soon, it is essential to find ways of meeting the growing demand for commodities without having to clear more forest, while making room for modest expansion of the forest area, probably with tree plantations, to increase carbon sequestration and meet the growth in demand for timber. The obvious way to do this is to increase agricultural productivity on the land currently used for growing crops and raising livestock. However, this will require increased inputs in the form of more mechanisation, fertilisers and water as well as possible genetic improvement of the crops concerned to increase disease resistance and growth potential. Just paying people not to clear forest or fell trees is not in itself going to solve the problem. As the Doi Tung project described above shows, diversifying the rural economy and improving livelihoods of small farmers and shifting cultivators is a much more viable approach for tackling the second of the drivers listed above. Infrastructure and mining are drivers that are more difficult to deal with and need to focus on minimising environmental damage. When forest must be cleared a condition should be that an equivalent area of forest is established elsewhere. For mining in forest areas it should be conditional on sites being well restored, with locally indigenous species, when the mining is finished. The unsustainable harvesting of logs is usually driven by the wood processing industry in a country expanding its capacity, and hence demand for logs, more than can be supplied sustainably from the accessible forests in the country. The additional demand is then either met by illegal logging in the country concerned or by importing logs, which may be logged illegally in another country. The Forest Law Enforcement, Government and Trade (FLEGT) process goes some way to dealing with this driver, but it is a European Union initiative and mainly deals with countries that trade with Europe. Its main focus is the establishment of Voluntary Partnership

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Agreements between the EU and timber exporting countries whereby all timber products exported to the EU are licenced as having been made from legally harvested logs. The FLEGT Action Plan mainly focuses on the process, with the incentive being the ability to export products to the EU. Illegal logging is discussed in more detail in Chap. 10. The main approach for dealing with the first two drivers, which involve conversion of land to agriculture by various parties, is by providing financial incentives through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Reducing Deforestation and forest Degradation plus Sustainable Forest Management (REDD+) protocols that have been agreed and discussed. It took some time for climate change to rise up the political Agenda after the UN Conference in 1992 that led to the establishment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). One of the outcomes was the spawning of a huge array of new acronyms: COP, GHG, LULUCF, REDD, CC, CDM, IPCC and many more, but it eventually led to the Kyoto accord reached 1997 that came into force in 2005, and is the first international agreement that attempted to promote some specific actions to reduce the global emissions of carbon dioxide and other Green House Gases (GHGs). In the mid-1960s it was already apparent that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were increasing, but at that time it was generally thought that a small rise in temperature and increase in CO2 concentration would increase the growth rate of many crops and plants, and especially trees would mop up most of the additional CO2 so that nature would solve the problem. Nowadays, Governments from developing countries, when asked to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) understandably take the view that why should they cut back on energy consumption to reduce emissions, when most of the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has come from the industrialised countries. Most feel that they need to industrialise too in order to reduce poverty. In fact there is another side to this argument, which we will come to later.

8  Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change

As mentioned earlier, the Kyoto Protocol included the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), was intended to facilitate measures to reduce emissions of Greenhouse gases and also to promote measures to sequester carbon dioxide. Forests sequester and store substantial amounts of CO2 and so some governments and forest departments saw this as a way of attracting funds for afforestation and reforestation from major emitters of carbon dioxide to offset against emissions that went over the limit set for them by their government to meet targets agreed to at Kyoto. The early optimism was soon dashed as proposals ran up against a number of practical problems, including the high transaction costs. If a company that emits large quantities of CO2 is going to pay for a certain amount of the gas to be sequestered by trees, both it and the government to which it reports its emission reductions need some evidence and guarantee that the agreed tonnage of CO2 has actually been locked up in the form of cellulose. It also needs to be able to demonstrate to the authorities that its actual emissions, minus the amount sequestered, are within the limit that it has been allowed. Further problems arose, because the requirements also dictated that the trees planted to sequester the CO2 would not otherwise have been planted without the payments for offsetting emissions, a feature known as “additionality”. If the trees would have been planted anyway, there would not have been any net additional sequestration. There was also a requirement that the land where the trees were to be planted had been devoid of trees since 1989 to avoid the possibility that people cleared forest in order to get the funds for replanting. In developed countries it was not too difficult to meet these requirements, because historic records of land-­ use are generally available, and plans for tree planting are normally incorporated into some form of management plan, making it fairly easy to show that proposed planting is additional to what would have taken place. There is also secure right of tenure, either through ownership titles or lease agreements for land in developed countries, so that it is more or less guaranteed that trees planted will remain undisturbed and sequester

Incentives for Avoiding Deforestation and Forest Degradation

CO2 for many years. Techniques and expertise for measuring the carbon content of the planted trees from time to time are readily available. In most developing countries, none of these conditions hold true; it is usually difficult to find satellite images of an area where trees could be planted to prove that it was deforested before 1989, and if by chance some cloud free images are available, the ownership over the land is usually uncertain. It may nominally be state land, but is often occupied by people who have just moved in, or by people descended from communities that have lived in the area for generations, but whose rights are not recognised or have just been usurped by the state. With such confusion over property rights it is perhaps not surprising that most people living in remote rural areas have little knowledge of the niceties of legality and so tend to use land or whatever they find growing on it. Throughout most of the humid tropics forests dominated the landscape until people moved in. While it may be possible to find land that was cleared of forest before 1989, it is rare to find such land in large blocks and that has been abandoned and is therefore available for planting with trees. Reforestation of small blocks is generally more costly, especially if fencing to protect against grazing or wild animals is necessary, and monitoring of many small block scattered over a wide area is both costly and difficult. Such abandoned land, where it can be found, is usually seriously degraded and has become grassland, that is also costly to re-establish with trees and is infertile so that tree growth is slow. All these difficulties mean that finding projects that qualify for funding under CDM is difficult and time consuming, which tends to further increase the “transaction costs”, and this effectively excludes small projects that will only sequester a small amount of CO2. In Vietnam, in 2004 a feasibility study for a possible CDM project to plant trees in the Central Highlands as part of a larger project for improving livelihoods through tree planting and other activities, found that at least 300,000 ha of special CO2 sequestering plantations would be needed in order to spread the start-up and monitoring costs

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over a big enough area to keep the cost per tonne of CO2 down to a level where the project would be profitable with the prevailing carbon price. Needless to say the project did not go ahead. As a result there have been very few successful CDM forestry projects in developing countries, and there is now, understandably a fair degree of scepticism among forest departments in developing countries that they can benefit from climate change related funding. In the meantime data on the various sources of emissions of CO2 was being extended and developed, and it became apparent that the clearance of forests for conversion to other land-uses and the steady degradation of the remaining forests due to over-­ logging were contributing very substantially to the overall global emissions of CO2. The 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 estimated that emissions of all greenhouse gases from forests and forest land-use changes, mainly in tropical countries, accounted for almost 20% of global GHG emissions. The Stern Review in 2006 had concluded that one of the least cost ways of reducing emissions of GHGs would be to pay tropical developing countries to protect and retain their forests rather than clearing them and converting to other land-uses. It did not recommend any particular figure for reducing deforestation but pointed out that halting deforestation would be just one measure necessary to stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations at 450  ppm. The review does, however, support the principle that payments for protecting forests should be calculated according to the “opportunity cost” of the use of land that would otherwise be available for agriculture. This means that the “lost profits” from not converting forest to oil palm plantations or agriculture would have to be paid. However, it did not indicate how to deal with a situation where the “opportunity cost” of not converting the forest exceeds the value of the emissions avoided. In 2005 the 11th Conference of Parties (COP11) set up a working group on reducing tropical deforestation, which reported back at the end of the 2007 to COP 13 in Bali. It took account

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of the growing consensus that deforestation must be tackled in order to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions, and recommended that the cost for doing so must be shared between nations and not be borne by the, largely poor, rainforest nations. Those UNFCCC discussions were initiated by proposals submitted by Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea and then endorsed by a large number of countries and institutions, called the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Those proposals were based on Costa Rica’s “Payments for Environmental Services” scheme, which involves payments for “those services provided by forest and forest plantations to protect and improve the environment”. They referred to the concept as “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries” (REDD) or “Avoided Deforestation”. The stated aim of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations was “to incorporate certified emissions offsets related to deforestation (in addition to afforestation and reforestation) within global carbon emissions markets by revising the Marrakech Accords, amending the Kyoto Protocol, or developing a linked ‘optional protocol’ under the UNFCCC”. At present, carbon trading provides funding for “afforestation and reforestation” but under the Kyoto protocol, no carbon finance is available for protecting existing forests. The Coalition for Rainforest Nations aims to raise large sums of funds for conserving tropical forests, much of it via carbon trading mechanisms. Their proposal submitted to a REDD workshop in March 2007 aimed at a combination between emissions trading and a separate fund. New funding would be for protecting existing forests only, though Clean Development Mechanism funding for afforestation and reforestation would also be expanded. The trading mechanism would be introduced after 2012 and would be in addition to emission reduction targets by Annex 1 nations. It was expected that the details of such a scheme would be negotiated and agreed at the Copenhagen Conference (COP15) in December 2009. There were a number of other proposals put forward including “Compensated Reduction” as proposed

8  Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change

by India; Brazil’s proposal for a non-market fund for reducing deforestation emissions, without any obligations on developing countries to reduce emissions, and Tuvalu’s Forest Retention Incentives Scheme, which would be an international fund for community-based forest management schemes. None of these proposals really addresses the root causes of deforestation and degradation nor the problem that the global area of forest that can capture and store carbon has declined to the point where it can no longer keep up with the increase in emissions (Ernsting and Rughani 2007). Forest destruction is driven by a combination of poverty, whereby farmers with no valid land title clear forest to increase food production and incomes, and by economics, whereby much land has a far higher commercial value for growing almost any crop, than it has as forest when just timber values are taken into account. The economic value of forests, however, in the form of soil, water and biodiversity conservation and other intangible benefits may be quite high, but is difficult to determine, because these services that forests provide are rarely marketed and so they have no direct monetary value; they have to be estimated by various indirect means, such as by asking people how much they are “willing to pay” for the service. The value of forest for water conservation could be estimated by looking at the likely cost of flood damage if the forest in a river basin is cleared and converted, but it is not a straightforward relationship. This gives forests in river basins that are well developed with, for example, hydro-power dams, irrigation schemes or other infrastructure or habitation, much higher values than forests in underdeveloped river basins. During an investigation in the Philippines for ways in which REDD funds might be applied to reduce deforestation in the Cordillera mountains in northern Luzon, it was found that many farmers were clearing forest on very steep hillsides to grow vegetables. For many of them this was a very profitable business, and the value of the land for the vegetables far exceeded any carbon value of the forest that was being cleared. Although forests provide many environmental

Incentives for Avoiding Deforestation and Forest Degradation

services that are beneficial to the community at large neither a poor farmer nor a rich farmer or corporation growing oil palm, bananas, pineapples or other such crops pay the economic cost of losing these services nor are they rewarded for providing such services. The variety of proposals for dealing with CO2 emissions from forests illustrates the complexity of the situation and these were reflected in the discussions in Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban and Warsaw and Paris, with so far, no clear agreement reached as to what will be funded and how. Under the original REDD concept, payment would only be made for reductions in emissions which would mean little or no reward for countries that have been successfully protecting their forests, since they would have a hard time proving that they had reduced emissions. Similarly, a country that had lost much of its forest in the past is likely to have reached a point where the rate of forest loss has slowed and emissions are declining anyway without any interventions so that it would be difficult to prove that additional emission reductions had been achieved. It also raises the question of whether the emission reductions should be measured, and paid for, in relation to a specific forest area, referred to as a “project approach” or on a national, regional or local government basis referred to as a “jurisdictional approach”. The former position raises the difficult problem of “leakage”, which is the displacement of emissions from one place to another. The latter makes it difficult, if not impossible to assign the payments to those that have successfully achieved emission reductions, since their efforts could be nullified by contrary action elsewhere in the country. However, Hovani (2015) describes the use of the Jurisdiction approach in one District in Indonesia and identifies a number of important benefits for the approach compared to a project approach, including avoidance of the need to establish land tenure and carbon ownership rights at the start, greater flexibility in design, lower transaction costs and easier integration into national programmes. However, since the international protocol under which REDD payments might/will be made has not yet been finalised, it is important to

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continue examining and testing all possible means for reducing emissions in order to determine the real and actual cost. Such studies and pilot activities also need to see how a range of other Payments for Environmental Services can be combined so that investments in protecting and regenerating forests become not just economically viable, but also financially attractive to the private sector and the farming community. Only by trying to achieve emission reductions can the practical difficulties be highlighted and the costs and benefits be better understood. This is a new challenge for those foresters who work in the international arena. All these problems can probably be overcome in time as experience from all the on-going pilot studies becomes available. However, the current low market price of carbon is likely to deter substantial private sector investment, which will be needed, if preventing further deforestation and forest degradation and promoting reforestation is to be implemented on a scale large enough to have a real impact. According to the World Bank (2018) the current average price of carbon dioxide is about US$7.4 per tonne CO2e, but the price varies widely between jurisdictions ranging from less than US$1 to US$139 per tonne CO2e in national rates of carbon tax and a current price in the European Trading Scheme (ETS) of US$16 per tonne CO2e. At these prices the total investment that might be available for forestry would be about US$14 billion for deforestation and US$7.4 billion for forest degradation. From the figures in the FAO Global Resource Assessment 2015, the average carbon stock density in the forest area that was lost between 2010 and 2015 is of the order of 38 tonnes of carbon per ha. The precise figure depends on the conversion factors used as discussed above. This will produce about 140 tonnes of carbon dioxide if burnt or allowed to decay naturally, which represents about US$1000 per ha and less than that if any of the wood is salvaged and made into durable products. This is barely enough to cover the cost of reforestation and is less than the opportunity cost of many of the alternative uses for the land.

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A total of 37 countries had a decline in their carbon stock density affecting a total area of about 335 million ha during the same period, equivalent to about 71.1 million ha annually. This is the source of the 0.9 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from forest degradation reported by Federico et al. (op. cit. 2015) and is equivalent to the annual emission of about 12.6 tonnes per ha of carbon dioxide. The current market value of this CO2 is equivalent to about US$100 per ha. If, as is likely, some of the loss in carbon stock resulting from forest degradation is due to illegal or unsustainable levels of logging, as much as a half of the carbon may actually finish up in durable forest products, which actually reduces both the actual emissions and the potential carbon revenue that might be generated by avoiding it.

8  Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change

The main impact of forest degeneration is in reducing the forest’s capacity to sequester carbon dioxide in the future. It is not clear as to how emissions from forest products are accounted for in the global estimates of total emissions. Many of the current REDD+ projects are struggling to demonstrate potential emission reductions at or below the current market price of carbon and rely on assumed economic benefits for their justification. As the World Bank (op. cit.) points out the market price of carbon dioxide will need to rise to somewhere in the range of US$40–80, by 2020 before it will become consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement. At those levels investing in forestry emission reductions and carbon sequestration will become more commercially attractive.

9

Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

Consumption of Timber Products The quantity of wood consumed annually is not known precisely, because in addition to the officially reported annual timber harvest there is an unrecorded volume of logs extracted each year from forests and woodlands around the world. There is in addition a small quantity of wood obtained from roadside, hedgerow, garden and parkland trees. Along the chain from the forest to the final consumer of wood products a considerable proportion of the original log volume is discarded as residues. Some residues are burnt to release the energy for some useful purpose such as drying more wood, and some are chipped or shredded to make into composite materials such as particleboard and medium density fibreboard or even pulp for paper making. The FAO statistics on forests production and trade recognise nine major groups of products, such as fuelwood, industrial roundwood, sawn wood, wood-based panels, pulp and paper, which are subdivided into a total of 56 categories. For each category it records the annual production and trade by quantity and value. Table 9.1 gives the figures for 2017 for the main product categories. The figures for charcoal are in tonnes and so with an average of about 6 cubic metres of wood to make 1 tonne of charcoal the quantity of wood used is about 300 million cubic metres. The recorded production of industrial roundwood is 1.885 billion cubic metres and fuelwood

and charcoal is 2.195 billion cubic metres. However, apparent consumption of logs for the production of products would have required a total of 3.16 billion cubic metres of logs as raw material giving a total annual consumption of 5.35 billion cubic metres of roundwood. Using the conversion factors from FAO, based on European standards, the volume of logs used in producing the quantities of the various products, excluding paper products and pulp made from fibres other than wood and residues, Table  9.1 shows that the estimated roundwood used in the products totals 3.158 billion cubic metres. The difference between this figure and the total recorded log production of 1.885 billion cubic metres is probably accounted for by a combination of the unrecorded use of residues from the sawmilling sector and unrecorded and illegal extraction of logs from the forest. Even with the assumption that about 60% of the residues from sawnwood, plywood and veneer production are used as raw material for pulp or wood-based panels, compared with the reported production there appears to be a deficit of about 0.27 billion cubic metres of sawlogs and veneer logs, and 0.39 billion cubic metres of pulpwood, a total of about 0.66 billion cubic metres. This could be partly explained by the conversion factors used for estimating the roundwood required for each product category, but mainly by unrecorded and probably illegal logging. In fact the actual conversion factors for all the logs processed in developing countries are likely to be

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_9

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

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Table 9.1  World production and trade in forest products in 2017 Conversion factor Product group Fuelwood Charcoal Sub-total Industrial roundwood Chips and particles Sawnwood Veneers Plywood Wood-based panels Pulp Paper Sub-total Total

1 1 1

Production Product vol. (mil. m3) 1891 50 1942 1885

Rwe (mil. m 3) 1891 303 2195 1885

Exports Product vol. (mil. m3) 6 2.5 8.5 126

Rwe (mil. m3) 6 15 21 126

Value (US$ mil.) 354 1203 1557 15.384

0.5

319

111

98

49

2.17 1.82 1.82 1.18

475 14 161 245

1033 26 252 291

152 5 31 59

330 9 56 70

38,528 2923 15,522 17,920

254 618 507 302

4.31 3.43

320 1003 1524a 3467

1379

117 261 601c 865

506

64,151 220,632 332,345 389,942

546 844 449 444

3158b 5353

1145 1172

7282

Unit value (US$/m3) 62 477 183 119 74

Source: FAOSTATS Rwe round wood equivalent a Excluding paper and logs b Excluding logs c Excluding paper

lower than those used for Table  9.1, so that the unrecorded volume of logs is very likely to be higher than the figure given in the previous paragraph. Adding in the fuelwood and charcoal production gives the total consumption of 5.3 billion cubic metres. Exports account for about 20% of the total production and will be discussed further below. If the world population increases to about 9.7 billion in 2050, as the UN population figures forecast and if per capita consumption of wood remains about the same, then demand could grow to as much as 7 billion cubic metres annually. It is likely that as the poorer parts of the world become richer, and more modern forms of renewable energy become available, the consumption of fuelwood will decrease but the consumption of industrial wood will increase and total demand may not change very much. However, such changes will have a big impact on the forest because fuelwood is usually small sized trees and branches while industrial roundwood is usually 20 cm or more in diameter and 2.5–4 m in length. Most species can be used for fuel, but for

industrial roundwood the number of species used is more limited. For forests to be managed sustainably, the future demand for wood products for consumption must be balanced with the capacity of those natural forests that are managed primarily for timber production and plantations to meet the demand without reduction of the growing stock. In other words forest degradation needs to be stopped and the area of tree plantations needs to be expanded to meet the growth in demand. The current consumption of industrial roundwood is likely to grow to about 6 billion cubic metres over the next 30 years, assuming that per capita consumption remains about the same. The actual volume will depend a lot on the level of product recovery from the logs. If the volume of products from each cubic metre of log is raised to the current best practice levels around the world the requirement for logs could be reduced by 10–15%. At present the recovery of product in most developing countries is about a half of that in the best of the developed countries.

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Production Forest

Production Forest The current global area of natural forest is about 3.68 billion ha of which about 1.84 billion ha are terrestrial protected areas, but not necessarily all forest. Only about 1.18 billion ha are classed as “Production” forest. Plantations cover about 277 million ha, which are probably part of the latter category. 1.66 million ha are reported as being the “Permanent Forest Estate”, which probably includes all or most of the Protected areas. With the definition of forest including very open and sparse forest, the area designated as Production forest probably represents the main source for logs and timber in the future. Fuelwood will generally come mainly from the more open forest areas with smaller trees and plantations and some from branchwood in logged forest. Data on the breakdown of natural and plantation areas by forest types and species at the global level is not available and so it is necessary to make some assumptions. For the sake of discussion, it is assumed that about 70% of the plantation area is for commercial timber production, the balance being for fuelwood and for environmental services and in some countries, primarily rubber latex, although the stem can eventually yield timber, Thus the productive area of plantations may be only around 200 million ha. Assuming also that the forest area designated as “Production forest” includes the production plantations, then it means that there are only about 1 billion ha of natural production forest. Assuming also that the average growing stock density of the natural Production forest and plantations is the same and is 10% higher than the country average, which covers all forest classes, and that 70% of the growing stock in the

natural forest is of commercial species, size and quality, then the current total commercial growing stock in natural production forest is of the order of 97.5 billion cubic metres and in plantations about 26 billion cubic metres. Table  9.2 summarises the situation. The estimated current consumption of industrial roundwood, of about 3.16 billion cubic metres (Table 9.1), may actually be over 4 billion if illegal logging is taken into account, and represents at least 2.5% and maybe as much as 3% of the commercial growing stock in natural forest and plantations. This is on the high side for long-term sustainability. The recorded harvest of 1.88 billion cubic metres is 1.5% of the commercial growing stock in natural Production forest and plantations, but there are 21 countries, which account for only 0.2% of the commercial growing stock and 3% of the recorded harvest, in which the harvest is more than 10% of the former. This is clearly not sustainable. When the whole growing stock is considered, which includes non-commercial species and wood in forest other than production forest, there are 85 countries that appear to be overcutting. This will be discussed in more detail below under trade issues. The current total annual rate of expansion of plantation area is about 3 million ha of which about 2.1 million ha are probably commercial. If this rate of establishment continues the total area of production plantations will reach about 265 million ha by 2050. If these plantations can achieve an overall average growth rate of about 5 cubic metres per ha per  an, they could supply about 1.32 billion cubic metres annually on a sustainable basis. That would leave around 4.7 billion cubic metres to be supplied from the natural production forest. If it still covers about 1

Table 9.2  Summary of growing stock in production natural forest, production plantations, other natural forest and other plantations Forest type Nat. prod. for Other nat. for Comm. plantations Other plant. Total

Growing stock (million m3) 2010 2015 Change 96,830 97,560 730 358.630 358,725 96 25,995 27,930 1933 7765 8360 577 489.215 492,550 3327

Gains No. countries 75 75 57 132

Volume 1340 4665 2135 638 8.780

Losses No. countries 41 67 35 32

Volume −610 −4525 −206 −62 −5480

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

billion ha (Table  9.2) and is not reduced any further by deforestation, it implies that the growth in the natural production forest would have to be significantly more than 4 cubic metres per ha per annum to achieve sustainability. This is possible in the temperate forests where most of the trees are commercial, but less certain in the more mixed natural forests in the tropics, especially where already degraded to some extent. The current average increment for the limited number of countries that report such data is about 2.7 cubic metres per ha at which rate current levels of harvest from the production forest are not sustainable overall. However, the lack of sustainability only applies to about 40 countries. This is one reason why forest other than production forest is being degraded and depleted.

Forest Timber Growing Stock Although overall the natural production forest and production plantations are showing a net annual increase in growing stock of about 0.54 billion cubic metres (Table 9.2) this is made up of gains of about 0.7 billion cubic metres annually in natural production forest in 57 countries and in commercial plantations in 75 countries and annual losses of about 0.16 billion cubic metres in natural production forest in 35 countries and in commercial plantations in 41 countries. Perhaps of greater concern is that the natural forest that is not designated for production is showing annual losses of about 0.9 billion cubic metres in about 67 countries. Some of this may be unrecorded or illegal harvesting of commercial logs that make up the difference between the recorded harvest and the apparent consumption of logs (Table 9.1). In 75 other countries the natural forest is showing annual gains of about the same amount, so that globally the change in the growing stock is not so apparent. These figures show that to stand any chance of achieving sustainable management of forests, deforestation and forest degradation must stop immediately and the area of plantations must continue to be expanded at least at the current rate. Any further reduction in the growing stock

density in the production forest will reduce the increment in the future and hence the potential harvest in the future. A likely outcome if this happens would be for an increase in illegal logging in Protected areas. The big problem is that with a current growing stock of 125 billion cubic metres in the natural production forest and plantations, there appears to be enough to meet the current demand for industrial roundwood of about 4 billion cubic metres for the next 30 years or so, so why worry! One reason to worry is that the apparent abundant supply of logs and the inability to control illegal logging depresses the price of logs and leads to inefficient processing and waste and to the depletion of a potentially valuable asset. The global total growing stock showed an increase of 3.34 billion cubic metres between 2010 and 2015. This was made up of gains of 8.7 billion cubic metres in 61 countries and losses of 5.4 billion cubic metres in 66 countries. Table 9.1 shows that the average value of logs exported is around US$119 per cubic metre, which after allowing for harvesting costs leaves a stumpage value of around US$50 per cubic metre. The 5.4 billion cubic metres that were lost between 2010 and 2015 represent a value of about US$50 billion annually, which could be used to reduce poverty, or left in the bank to grow for harvesting in the future. The FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment 2015 gives net increment data for 58 countries of which 3 are eliminated as being very unrealistic and extreme values. The average net annual increment for the remaining 55 countries, two thirds of which are temperate developed ones, is 2.8% of the average growing stock density. Applying this figure to the commercial growing stock in the natural production forest suggests that total net annual increment is around 3.4 billion cubic metres, which is only very slightly more than the estimated harvest derived from the quantities of products produced. Countries can be divided into two groups with respect to changes in the growing stock in natural production forest areas between 2010 and 2015. There are 71 countries where the growing stock increased, and 41 countries where the growing

Forest Timber Growing Stock

97

Table 9.3  Natural production forest areas and growing stock for groups of countries according to the direction of change in growing stock from 2010 to 2015

Change Gain Lose Total

No. of countries 71 41 112

Area (‘000 ha) 408,785 575,973 1,004,758

Growing stock 2015 (million m3) 45,555 43,439 88,994

stock decreased. Other countries do not report having any production forest, Table  9.3 gives details of the two country groups for their natural production forest areas. The table shows that for the countries that gained growing stock, the growing stock increased by 1.25 million cubic metres despite reported increment of 1.65 billion cubic metres, suggesting that there was actually a net loss of about 0.4 billion cubic metres. Similarly for the countries that lost growing stock, the growing stock declined by 0.43 billion cubic metres despite increment of 1.8 billion cubic metres, suggesting a total net loss of growing stock of 2.2 billion cubic metres. Adding the two net losses gives a total net loss of about 2.8 billion cubic metres. This is remarkably close, considering all the assumptions made, to the total industrial roundwood harvest, including logs from trees felled illegally or not recorded of 3.1 billion cubic metres, estimated above (Table 9.1). Increment can also be estimated by considering the net change in growing stock over a period. Using the FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment figures, the change in forest area between 2010 and 2015 can be calculated for 154 countries and can be adjusted to take account of changes in plantation areas. The growing stock at the start of the period is adjusted to take account of both the growing stock that will be lost due to changes in the area during the period and the volume harvested during the period. This is then compared with the growing stock at the end of the period to estimate the net increment. The results give an estimate of the total annual increment of 3.074 billion cubic metres, which is remarkably close to the 3.1 billion cubic metres estimated in the paragraph above and the 3.4

Growing stock incr. (million m3) 1648 1793 3449

Change in GS 2010–2015 (million m3) 1254 −432 821

Population (million) 3671 3658 7329

billion cubic metres in Table 9.3. Comparing the reported annual harvest with the estimated annual increment, 85 countries appear to be overcutting by harvesting more than their increment. The apparent overcutting amounts to about 783 million cubic metres annually, which again is of the same order of magnitude as the log volume deficit estimated in Table  9.1 of 660 million cubic metres. The consistency of the results from different ways of analysing the data suggests very strongly that: • The annual forest degradation resulting from illegal and unrecorded log harvesting is in the region of 650–700 million cubic metres annually. • That globally forests have reached a tipping point where the annual log harvest is more than the increment, which will result in an increasingly steep decline in increment from now on. • The threat is most serious in tropical forests, but is being driven in part by high demand for timber products in developed countries. All the countries that lost growing stock except three (Russian Federation, Greece and New Zealand) are tropical or subtropical developing countries while almost 60% of the countries that gained are temperate developed countries. The conclusion to draw from this is that the temperate production forests are just about being managed for a sustainable harvest of logs, but that the tropical and subtropical countries are depleting their growing stock of commercial logs, and the rate of depletion will accelerate in the future as a result.

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

Supply–Demand Balance It is clear from the discussion in the previous section that the key to achieving sustainable forest management is ensuring that the supply of industrial roundwood and fuelwood needed to meet the likely future demand is sustainable. If the permanent production forest estate, including plantations, cannot meet the demand on a sustainable basis, then the protected areas will not be safe and forest degradation will continue as removals by logging exceed the growth capacity of the forest. Habitats will continue to be destroyed and soil erosion and flash flooding will increase. Action is needed to resolve the situation. At the country level this could involve closing some wood processing industries, importing either raw material or finished products, improving the efficiency of the wood processing industry to reduce the amount of raw material needed, perhaps by raising royalties on logs harvested, or a combination of all these measures. Action at the international level will be discussed later. A first step in understanding the situation is to examine the supply and the demand side in detail at the country level and determine whether they are currently in balance. The supply side includes all the sources of wood raw material from different forest types, plantations and if appropriate, imports of both raw material and products. The information needs to be categorised and quantified according to end-use such as sawlogs, chipwood, pulpwood and fuelwood. The demand side may be more difficult depending on the structure of the industry and the available data. If data on raw material inputs and product outputs are available for the different parts of the wood processing industry, then it can be straightforward, but data on the processing capacity should also be obtained in order to assess the likelihood of demand rising if economic circumstances change and as a cross check that the raw material input data are consistent with the recorded output data. Export data on logs and products must be included on the demand side. If such data is not available, which is the situation in many developing countries, then it is

necessary to obtain it by means of sample surveys and indirect assessments. An example of the latter is to look for data on house construction, which is a major source of demand for timber in most countries and interviews with companies involve in the wholesale of timber products. Figure 9.1 shows the framework developed in Indonesia by the Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Programme for determining the supply balance. On the left side are all the sources of raw material: imports of different products (Value—red, quantity—purple), forest production of industrial roundwood (dark green—forest type, light green—sustainable productivity, yellow—production), forest production of other products such as poles and fuelwood. On the right side are all the sources of demand: processing capacity by industry type; domestic demand by product type (quantity—purple, value—red); exports by product type (quantity— light purple—value—red); fuelwood. The quantities from each source and end-use are aggregated and then in the Centre are: total processing capacity; the surplus (if any) available for export; total domestic demand; the overall balance. This final figure should be zero if supply and demand are balanced. If it is positive, then the quantity available for export can be increased. If it is negative, then it indicates that illegal logging is taking place to make up the shortfall from the sustainable supply. In Indonesia in 1998 when the balance was calculated it was a large negative value, around 50 million cubic metres. The reasons for this were a combination of a very large number of small unlicenced and unregistered sawmills supplying the domestic market and a focus on the large export oriented sector of the industry in data gathering. The Sustainable supply, approved in concession management plans, was sufficient to meet the raw material needs for exports, but took no account of the domestic demand of some 200 million people for house, office and hotel construction and maintenance, furniture, paper and other wood products. The Industry capacity and actual production was obtained by a series of sample surveys of the

Trade-in Timber Forest Products

99

Fig. 9.1  Framework for determining the supply/demand balance for Indonesia

larger registered companies and a combination of data collection from local government on any small licenced wood processing capacity and incognito visits on the ground to all small processing installations in a number of sample districts. After allowing for the volume of logs used in the manufacture of all exports the rest of the estimated production was assumed to be the domestic consumption. Corroboration of the veracity of the estimated unrecorded log harvest was obtained by an independent estimate of domestic demand obtained through a combination of data on subsectors like construction and furniture making, handicrafts plus some sample surveys of wood merchants and traders. A third estimate was made by examining the results of the on-going National Forest Inventory which recorded the areas of logged forest, which could be identified on satellite images by the presence of roads. The area of forest that appeared to have been logged since the previous inventory was consistent with the estimates of the total log harvest, including the unrecorded volumes.

Trade-in Timber Forest Products Everyone needs wood products to some extent for everything from construction materials, furniture, utensils and musical instruments to paper products and toothpicks. Unfortunately forests are not evenly distributed around the world so that some countries have an abundance and others a paucity in the availability of the raw material. Countries that lack forest resources can import from those that have a surplus to their own requirements and countries with abundant forest resources can export either logs or primary or secondary products. As Table  9.1 shows, global annual trade in roundwood was about 126 million cubic metres in 2017, or about 6.7% of total production. Exports of products utilised about 1.14 billion cubic metres of roundwood or about 36.2% of the total estimated amount harvested. For individual products the proportion of the production exported ranged from about 22% for plywood to 44% for chips and particles, which would be used

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

for making pulp or wood-based panels in the importing country. The total value of the exports was almost US$390 billion. Recorded imports are slightly less in volume but their average price is about 10% higher due to the freight costs. Exports are about 3 million cubic metres more than imports and presumably are in transit and so not yet recorded as imports. While trade is a good thing for increasing the wealth of countries that have a surplus of timber and for improving the quality of life for those countries that have a deficit in wood supply, there are also negative aspects of trade. Almost all countries import some wood products, but 18 countries import more than 10 million cubic metres roundwood equivalent totalling over 1090 million cubic metres or 62% of all imports. Nine of these are European countries and the rest are North American (three), East Asian (three), Middle East (two) and South Asia (one). On the other hand, 204 countries export some wood products with a recorded total in 2017 of 979 million cubic metres, but of these, 60 countries appear to be overcutting their forests in order to do so. These 60 countries reported that in 2017 they harvested a total of 608 million cubic metres and that they exported the roundwood equivalent of 355 million cubic metres. Their growing stock has declined by an average annual total of 909 million cubic metres, some of which has been used for the manufacture of products, which are exported. An unknown proportion has probably been felled illegally to meet either the domestic or the export demand and some will have just been burnt for land clearance, but such data does not exist. The annual increment can be estimated from the change in growing stock over a period and the amount of wood harvested during the same period after deducting any loss in growing stock due to forest clearance. An increase in the growing stock indicates that the forest has grown more than the amount harvested, but a decline in the growing stock indicates that the harvest has exceeded the increment and so there has been unsustainable over cutting. The annual harvest (production of roundwood) plus imports minus exports expressed as

roundwood equivalent is a measure of the total consumption of wood in the country and so the average per capita consumption can be calculated from population data. Aggregating the country data reported to FAO on these factors gives an estimated total global industrial roundwood consumption of 1.999 billion cubic metres. The difference between this figure, and the figure quoted in Table 9.1 of about 0.114 billion cubic metres, is mainly due to the discrepancies between the reported imports and exports together with some of the unrecorded log production referred to earlier. The total consumption of 1.999 billion cubic metres represents an annual consumption of 0.273 cubic metres per caput. There is a fairly strong relationship between the per caput consumption and per caput GDP based on the latest World Bank data, as shown in Fig. 9.2. The 60 countries that appear to be overcutting their forests have an average per caput GDP of US$3396, which should result in an average consumption of about 0.143 cubic metres per caput according to the general relationship in Fig. 9.2, but they actually have a consumption of only 0.124 cubic metres per caput or about 13% less than would be expected from their current level of GDP. This is further evidence that there is likely to be a significant volume of unrecorded and illegal logging taking place in those countries. The fact that they are exporting substantial quantities of wood products means that the demand for wood products in importing countries is contributing towards degradation of forests in many exporting countries. The Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) programme promoted by the European Union is clearly an important contribution towards more sustainable forest management, but it mainly addresses the large export oriented companies for whom selling to the European market is important, especially in view of its size. The nine European countries mentioned above collectively import about 463 million cubic metres annually. It does not address the issue of over-exploitation of the resource for the domestic market in the exporting countries, which is a major driver of illegal logging.

The Structure of the Timber Processing Industry

101

Apparent per capita consumption

1.800 1.600 1.400 1.200 1.000

y = 1E-05x + 0.1069 R² = 0.45336

0.800 0.600 0.400 0.200 0.000

0.0

20,000.0

40,000.0

60,000.0

80,000.0

100,000.0

120,000.0

Fig. 9.2  Relationship between annual wood consumption per caput and GDP per caput

 he Structure of the Timber T Processing Industry Over the past few decades the wood processing industry has developed a wide range of products that can use small sizes and irregular shapes of wood raw material. Various forms of chipping and defibration have led to the development of particleboard, Oriented Strand Board (OSB), Medium and High Density Fibreboard (MDF/HDF) and others. This has led to a change in style and fashion for furniture where panel products such as those just mentioned can be used to create boxes of various shapes and sizes that can become kitchen cabinets, wardrobes and other bedroom furniture, cupboards, office furniture, desks and tables. In many of the poorer developing countries there has been little or no investment in wood processing, with the result that there is enormous wastage. In some countries, chairs and other furniture are still made from solid wood, carved to create curves and other traditional shapes. Sawmills often have recovery factors as low as

30% and there is not much of a market for all the offcuts and trimmings. There is an understandable desire to do as much processing as possible in the log producing country, but if it takes twice the amount of wood to produce an item compared with the amount used in a country with a modern highly efficient industry, then there is little gain, and maybe even a loss. As an example if a log is exported for US$119 per cubic metre and sawnwood is exported at US$254 per cubic metre (the current average prices—see Table 7.2), then if more than 2.13 cubic metres of log are used to make the sawn wood, there is an overall loss as the value of the sawnwood is less than that of the logs that are used, and this does not take account of the cost of sawmilling. This level of wood consumption represents a recovery of 46%, which is about the global average and much higher than is achieved in many developing countries. Countries such as Indonesia and Brazil with large forest resources can attract investment in large-scale modern efficient processing, but

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

many smaller countries are unable to invest themselves or attract foreign investors. The 60 countries that are overcutting their resources have an average of about 23 million ha of forest, of which about 13 million ha are classed as production forest, so some of them ought to be able to attract investment to upgrade their wood processing industries. It is misleading to the public in the rich developed countries to claim that a wood product has come from a sustainably managed forest, when a consequence of the importation is to drive up prices and reduce the sustainable supply of logs in the exporting countries. This encourages small operators to log illegally in order to get cheap logs to meet the domestic demand. Importers of wood products from developed countries need to take a more holistic view of the situation in the producing countries in order to ensure that all forest in the country is being managed sustainably and not just the forest areas from which their products originate. Investing in small local sawmills in developing producer countries in both equipment and training to enable them to increase substantially their efficiency in the use of raw materials would be a good step towards achieving sustainability of the forest resource. The training should also include health and safety issues, as these are often abysmal. It is rare in many small sawmills in developing countries to see operators wearing safety helmets with earmuffs and goggles, and often footwear is just a pair of flip-flops. The area of natural production forest has already declined to about 1 billion ha of which 544 million ha or a little more than a half is in tropical and subtropical developing countries. These same countries reported that they harvested 518 million cubic metres in 2017, which is only about 27% of the recorded global production, but their exports of forest products were 31% of the total. Apart from supporting the modernisation of the wood processing industry in developing countries, especially the small-scale operators, the international timber industry needs to consider how to use the remaining resource more efficiently. This should include considering how

to make the best use of the various types of wood that are available. Many hardwood species are primarily valued for their decorative qualities. The Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the International Union for the Conservation of nature (IUCN) both have lists of endangered species that include many tree species, some of which are widely used commercially. The IUCN has a RED list with 55 tree species of which 6 are critically endangered and a further 12 are endangered. This list includes species such as rosewood, which is becoming very scarce and which should no longer be used for making solid wood products other than perhaps small items that can be made from offcuts and branchwood. In Thailand, where Teak is now very scarce there is a thriving handicraft industry making such things as bowls and handles for cutlery from root stumps and branches. In future decorative hardwoods, especially those from the tropics should be used only for veneers for use on wood-based panels, which should in turn be made mainly from either plantation wood or residues and possibly branchwood from selective felling of trees in natural production forest areas. Inventories of production forest need to be carried out in order to assess the sustainable yield of valuable species so that the industry can adapt the way it utilises species for different purposes. The pulping sector of the wood industry also needs to do more to ensure that its raw material comes from plantations and not natural forest. At the present time there are 58 countries that produce pulp of one kind or another. The list includes 24 European countries, 3 from North America, 4 from East Asia, Russia, Australia and New Zealand. The remaining 24 are developing countries. Europe appears to have a surplus of pulpwood and chips of around 26 million cubic metres after allowing for exports and imports. North America and East Asia both have large deficits of 56 million cubic metres and 10 million cubic metres, respectively, while Australia, New Zealand and Russia have a net surplus of 28 million cubic metres. Among the developing countries 6 have a combined surplus of 7 million cubic metres of wood raw material for their

The Structure of the Timber Processing Industry

pulping industry while the remaining 18 have a combined deficit of 20 million cubic metres. Thus overall there is an industry wide deficit of about 25 million cubic metres. Included in the totals above is an annual trade of about 70 million cubic metres of wood chips and particles between various countries. The overall unexplained deficit of 25 million cubic metres is too large to be explained by the conversion factors used to put all the units as roundwood equivalent. Some may be from recycled paper and from residues but there must also be some from unrecorded log production. However, if the production of wood-based panels is taken into account, which must be competing for much of the same raw material, the situation is much worse. Europe, North America and East Asia all appear to have large deficits and two of the developing countries that have a small surplus of pulpwood also have an overall deficit when panel production is taken into account. The total deficit is about 265 million cubic metres, which is about 14% of the reported total annual industrial roundwood production. Some of it will be accounted for by the use of residues and recycled material and the conversion factors used to estimate the roundwood equivalent may account for a small proportion, but there is clearly a significant deficit which must be from unrecorded and illegal logging. The most worrying is the deficit in the 18 developing countries since it is not explained by imports and so suggests that there is substantial unrecorded and possibly illegal logging being driven by the pulp and panel industry. Most of the

103

surplus pulpwood in the four developing countries and Australia, New Zealand and Russia, amounting to about 17 million cubic metres, forms part of the amount traded with East Asia and North America. Table  9.4 summarises the situation. The 58 countries with a pulp and wood-based panel industry have a total of 186 million ha of commercial plantations, on the assumption that about 70% of all plantations are commercial and if it is also assumed that about 40% of the pulpwood produced comes from these plantations, then the apparent average annual yield is about 5 cubic metres per ha. This suggests that about 53 million ha of additional commercial plantations are needed in order to meet the deficit for small roundwood for pulp and panels. Earlier it was suggested that plantations need to be expanded at the rate of about 3 million ha annually, which is more or less the current rate, but if sustainability of forest management is to be achieved, it would appear that annual planting of about 10 million ha is needed between now and 2025 if the Sustainable Goal 15 is to be achieved. The FLEGT Programme is negotiating Voluntary Partnership Agreements with a number of developing countries which will help to ensure that wood products exported to Europe are made only for wood from sustainably managed forests. This is a useful first step, but it needs to be expanded along with Certification to provide a guarantee that the timber is coming from a country that manages all its forests sustainably, rather than just from forests that are managed sustainably. This means working with the small

Table 9.4  Summary of surpluses and deficits in pulp and wood-based panel raw material supplies by country groups Country group Europe N. America E. Asia Aus-NZ-Russia Dev. countries surplus Dev. countries deficit Total

Number of countries pulpwood 24 3 4 3 6

Surplus/deficit pulpwood (mil. m3rwe) +26 −56 −10 +28 +7

Number of countries WBP 24 3 4 3 4

Surplus/deficit WBP (mil. m3 rwe) −37 −99 −124 +12 +5

18

−20

20

−42

58

−25

58

−265

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

industries that supply the domestic market and which cannot afford the cost of registering through a VPA or getting certified as they seldom have a forest concession and their level of profitability is too low to be able to afford the costs of registration and certification. Where large export oriented companies have concessions part of the condition for VPA registration or Certification should be that they supply all local sawmills with certified logs from their concessions. This would ensure that the domestic market was also using wood products from sustainably managed forests and it would reduce the amount of wood available for export. This would help to increase prices and so offset some or all of the costs of meeting the needs of the domestic market.

 orest Management for Timber F Production In 2015 there were about 1277 million ha of primary forest left in the world, according to the FAO Forest Resource Assessment, which is about a third of the total forest area. However, 82.5% of the remaining primary forest is in just nine countries and it is roughly equally divided between northern temperate forests in Russia and North America and tropical humid forests in four Latin American countries and one each in Africa and Asia. The remaining 223 million ha is spread over 108 countries. The 117 countries that still have primary forest have a total of 631 million ha declared as Permanent Forest Estate (PFE), but the data does not indicate how much of it is primary forest and whether it includes Protected Areas. The same countries report having 287 million ha as Production forest. The latter almost certainly includes some plantations but the data does not allow a detailed breakdown of the composition of either the Production forest or the Permanent Forest Estate. Some countries designate some of their forests specifically for production and other countries prefer the idea of multiple-use, which includes production together with other functions. Other countries do not designate forest for

any specific function but in effect practice multiple-use management. These concepts can apply to both natural forests and to plantations. In trying to achieve sustainability it is important to have a clear strategy for the overall management of the forest estate. The importance of creating permanent forest management units has already been discussed and these units can be all natural forest, all plantations or a combination of the two broad forest types. The strategy will determine the objects of management, and for the Production forest it is desirable that the role of the two forest types is clearly specified. The natural forest areas may still contain some primary forest but if it has been selectively logged, it will still have large trees of mixed species and ages. Inventories will determine the sustainable future yield and the species and size class distribution and the strategy should determine the uses for the future production that gives the highest value. As Table 9.1 shows, veneers are the most valuable product, especially when looked at in terms of the loge utilised and are worth almost three times as much as sawlogs. For certain uses, the hardwoods from both the tropics and temperate regions have properties that make sawnwood made from them especially valuable, and it makes no economic sense to saw such fine hardwoods for utility end-­uses, and even worse to use them for block board and other panel products. Even tops and branches may be better used, as mentioned above, for handicrafts, which can provide much needed local rural employment, rather than as fuelwood or for pulping. Plantations, on the other hand, tend to be monocultures often of exotic species and, in the tropic often of fast growing species. Many plantations can produce a proportion of logs large enough for sawing, and these should be used for all utility purposes where the special properties of strength, durability or decorative characteristics from the valuable natural forest species are not required. A forest management strategy should determine the balance between natural forest and plantations as well as the overall extent of the forest estate. The aim should always be to retain the maximum possible area of natural forest and

105

Adding Value to Timber Products

use plantations to supplement the production of raw material to meet first the needs of the domestic market and then if appropriate an export market where the country enjoys a competitive advantage. With an adequate supply of raw material from plantations the pressure on the natural forest is reduced and the risk of illegal logging is reduced.

Adding Value to Timber Products In 1991, the International Tropical Timber Organisation commissioned a study by the Oxford Forestry Institute and the Timber Research and Development Association to look at Incentives in Producer and Consumer countries to promote sustainable use of forests. One of the outputs of this study was a model of the value added chain from the forest to the end-user. The model looked at all the material, labour, energy, machinery and capital costs as well as royalties, levies and taxes, including import and export taxes and value added or sales taxes from log harvest through to retail sales of the end products.

Data was gathered from six producer countries, two each in South America, Africa and Asia, and from Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan as consumer countries. Three scenarios were studied with the model; (1) the first was log production and export only in the producer country with primary and secondary processing being done in the consumer country; (2) the second was log production and primary production and exports in the producer country with secondary processing in the consumer country (3) the third was all processing in the producer country with export of the final products and only wholesale and retail sales in the consumer country. The results of the analysis showing the percentage of the total value accruing to each of the factors of production for the three scenarios are shown in Table  9.5. The table shows that even with all the processing done in the producer country, it only captures about one-third of the value that is added from log to sale of the final product. The reason that the consumer countries capture such a high proportion is because VAT, wholesale and retail mark-ups and profits are based on the import price of the product, which is

Table 9.5  The percentage of the total value of end products accruing to each factor of production for three scenarios Producer country

Consumer country

Total chain

Factor Gov. rev. Labour Capital Fuel Other costs Profit Total Gov. rev. Labour Capital Fuel Other costs Profit Total Gov. rev. Labour Capital Fuel Other costs Profit Total

Log production 2.65 0.47 0.67 0.24 4.28 0.89 9.20 24.49 11.07 6.02 0.67 20.18 26.17 90.80 27.14 11.54 8.69 1.11 24.46 27.06 100.00

Primary products 1.99 1.24 1.86 0.47 3.84 1.03 10.33 25.03 11.59 7.90 0.81 20.07 24.07 81.47 27.02 12.83 9.74 1.28 24.01 25.1 100.00

Secondary products 6.67 4.16 8.81 1.37 5.76 8.37 35.33 23.13

19.32 22.22 64.67 29.99 4.16 8.81 1.37 25.08 30.59 100.00

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

much higher than the log price. For the same reason the government revenue is almost four times higher in the consumer country compared with the producer country. Another reason for the difference between producer and consumer country revenue is the recovery factor for product from log to primary product and primary to secondary product. These were found to be much lower in the producer countries so that the value added per cubic metre of log is much less. Even with all processing being done in the producer country, only about 8.4% of the final price is captured as profit in the producer country compared with 22.2% in the consumer country and similarly the government only captures about 6.7% in the producer country compared with almost 30% in the consumer country.

Non-timber Forest Products Many of the issues discussed above with regard to timber apply also to non-timber forest products. The need to inventory and monitor the resource, the need to balance supply and demand and the need to ensure that international trade does not drive over-exploitation of the resource are just as important. However, there are some important differences. One major difference is the sheer number and variety of non-timber forest products that are available and are utilised by humans. Another difference is that the quantities of any particular non-timber forest product that can be found in any hectare of forest tend to be quite small. The one exception to this is fuelwood, which is by far the biggest non-timber forest product by volume and weight. Much of the research and discussion relating to non-timber forest products has focussed on tropical forests, because, on the one hand, such products are so numerous and varied in tropical forests and on the other hand they are very often of vital importance to the livelihood of local communities. This can either be by providing an additional source of income and/or by providing a source of food, medicines, energy and raw materials such as bamboo, rattans, fibres and thatching for house construction and other utility items.

 ood-Based Energy: Fuelwood W and Charcoal Most countries have data on fuelwood production, though it is often just estimated and incomplete, and may be based on estimates of per capita consumption and the proportion of the population that uses wood for energy. A large proportion of the fuelwood is gathered by individual households (usually the women or girls) and is not accurately measured or recorded. A substantial but unknown proportion is dead wood from fallen trees and branches and is cut from garden and roadside trees, so that the impact on the forest is difficult to assess. Wood used as fuel by industries such as brick making, tobacco curing and for limekilns may be relatively large, usually a metre long and 5–20  cm in diameter, and usually comes from branchwood and small trees. Domestic fuelwood is generally smaller as it has to be carried, sometimes for considerable distances, and many poor households do not have the necessary tools to break it down into smaller pieces for use in stoves. Charcoal is used by a number of industries including the production of pure silica (see Plate 9.1) and for iron smelting. Some is also refined to create activated charcoal that is used for filtration and air purification. Most domestic use of charcoal is for basic cooking in developing countries, and for barbecues in many developed countries.

Plate 9.1  Samples of quartz and charcoal, used to make silica

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Wood-Based Energy: Fuelwood and Charcoal

The Food and Agriculture Organisation provides global statistics of annual fuelwood and charcoal production. As shown in Table 9.1 the total recorded annual production of fuelwood and charcoal is about 2.2 billion cubic metres, or more than the recorded production of industrial roundwood. About 12.4% of the fuelwood is produced in OECD member countries. The total production of charcoal is 52.3 million tonnes, which would require about 300 million cubic metres of wood to make. About 3% is produced in OECD member countries.

 roperties of Wood as an Energy P Source The principle attributes of wood as a source of energy are: • It is renewable provided supplies are obtained from properly managed plantations or sustainably managed natural forest where the harvest is less than the increment. • It can be easily stored. • It contains no polluting impurities such as sulphur, though improper combustion in an open stove can give of toxic volatiles. • It can be readily converted to other more convenient forms such as heat, electricity or gas, and technology may soon be available for converting it to liquid fuel. • It can be produced cheaply in small quantities to meet individual requirements. • The technology for harvesting and converting wood is simple, low cost and well proven. • Fuelwood plantations can be aesthetically pleasing and can bring other benefits such as shelter, wildlife and even by-products such as honey. • The energy can be extracted from the wood after it has been used for other purposes or from residues produced during conversion processes (e.g. sawmill offcuts). • The ash residues resulting from burning wood are a very low proportion of the original fuel weight (1.5–3.0%) and can be recycled as a fertiliser.

Wood like most fuels is a variable commodity but some properties are sufficiently consistent for typical values to be quoted and used in design work. Wood cellulose has a heat value of 4610 kcal/kg (19.3 MJ/kg) and most woods have between 370 and 450 kg dry weight/m3. Standing wood has a moisture content on a fresh weight basis of about 50%, which may be reduced by air drying to about 15–20%, and the heat value of fuelwood depends on its moisture content. There are not great differences between species, with the exception of highly resinous conifers, which can have heat values about 10% above those other species. Pine resin has a heat value of about 9029  kcal/kg (37.8  MJ/kg) according to Howard (1973). The heat value of air dry wood (15% m.c.) is about 16  MJ/kg (3820  kcal/kg) and for fresh wood (30% m.c.) is about 14 MJ/kg (3350 ­kcal/ kg). For practical purposes a figure between the last two would represent a reasonable value for fuelwood. Table 9.6 compares the heat values of wood with other common domestic fuels. Table 9.6 shows that wood has about one-third the heat value of natural gas and fuel oil, about one-half that of coal and about twice that of peat. The economics of using wood as fuel are mainly dependent on the cost of growing and harvesting it and converting it to a convenient form for use in whatever conversion system is being operated. In many developing countries wood is burnt in various forms of simple stove, but in developed countries it is increasingly being used as an industrial fuel using sophisticated combustion systems, on the grounds that it is a renewable fuel and therefore carbon neutral. During the 1980s, when the price of oil rose sharply, interest in biofuels suddenly increased, Table 9.6  Comparative thermal and energy properties of common and domestic fuels Energy source Natural gas Heating oil Coal Wood charcoal Wood (20% m.c.) Peat

MJ/kg 47 40–44 27–36 28 15–19 7–12

kcal/kg 11,310 9565–10,520 6450–8600 6700 3590–4610 1670–2870

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

and in Scotland a whisky distillery installed a boiler to use forest residues as fuel. It received a grant from the Department of Energy with a condition that the operations be monitored for a year to determine the costs in detail. The residues were from branchwood from conifer plantations within about a 50-mile (80  km) radius of the distillery in the North East of Scotland. A mobile chipping machine mounted on a forwarder harvested and chipped the branchwood, which was transported to the distillery by three large trucks that ran a continuous shuttle between the forest and the distillery. The monitoring (Fraser 1985) was done periodically throughout the year at different locations for 3–4 days at a time and three different methods of presenting the branchwood were investigated. These were: (1) leaving the branchwood where it was removed from the tree; (2) windrowing the branchwood so that the chipper could move up and down between the windrows and (3) putting all the branchwood in a big pile near the truck loading point so that the chipper could remain static and did not have to traverse the site to off load the chips. The trucks delivering the chips were monitored using their tachographs. There was a trade-off between the harvesting cost for the logs from the trees and the branchwood for fuel, with the former increasing as more time was spent moving the branchwood, and the latter decreasing as the chipper spent less time moving around. Overall static chipping gave the least cost for the fuel even when the tree fellers were compensated for the additional work that they had to do. The monitoring of the transportation from forest to distillery using the tachographs in the trucks was revealing. It soon became possible to tell from the shape of the tachograph trace where the vehicle was at any point in time, because the trace showed characteristic patterns corresponding to sharp bend, steep gradients, junctions and built-up areas. From these observations it was possible to estimate the average speed on different classes of road, and from that determine the distance in any direction from the distillery that was commercially viable to harvest the residues, in comparison with the prevailing cost of the alternative fuels. In

principle, such a model could be applied to other potential industrial sites that might wish to use woody biomass fuel, to determine whether sufficient resources exist within a commercially viable radius of the proposed plant. The growing cost is mainly determined by site conditions and the tree species chosen. Fertile lowland sites which allow high growth rates and species, which have relatively fast growth rates in their early years, will give the lowest cost of fuelwood. In the tropics some species of Eucalyptus and Acacia are widely used and in temperate regions some species of Salix, Betula, Alnus and Acer are examples of relatively fast growing hardwood species. Coppicing has been and remains the traditional management method for fuelwood as it yields relatively small sized stems with short rotations. The harvesting cost depends on a variety of factors, of which accessibility; the number of trees per unit area and average tree size are the most important. Branchwood from large open grown trees being of irregular size and shape is costly to harvest. The most economic method of producing fuelwood is likely to be in dense plantations where trees will tend to be fairly uniform and can be harvested when the trees are at the most convenient size for the subsequent conversion technology. For more industrial use of wood for energy the preparation of wood as a fuel must be well organised if costs are to be kept down and it is preferable to harvest the wood well ahead of the time when it will be used as fuel to allow plenty of time for drying by sun and wind. There is no reason why wood should not be converted from the tree length into billets or lumps to suit any conversion technology and dried to a standard moisture content so that it can be directly compared with other fuels. In many developing countries the collection of fuelwood is still mainly the job of women and children, who collect it from surrounding forests. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia large areas of Eucalyptus globulus were established forming a “Green Belt” around the city in the early years of the twentieth century and have been the major source of energy for the city for more than 100 years (see Box 9.1 for more details).

Wood-Based Energy: Fuelwood and Charcoal

Box 9.1: The Green Belt of Addis Ababa

Prior to the twentieth century, the capital of Ethiopia moved periodically, partly for political reasons and partly because essential sources of fuelwood had declined drastically. In 1887 the then Emperor, Menelik II moved the capital from Gondar to the present location at Addis Ababa, where there are hot springs. The population grew rapidly, and soon fuelwood became a problem again. Around the turn of the Century, the French were building a railway from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, and the story goes that the Emperor consulted with the chief engineer about transporting fuel. Since, at that time the trains also used wood as fuel, the engineer suggested that the Emperor should plant Eucalyptus trees around the city. The Emperor managed to import a large number of Eucalyptus trees from Australia, and either by luck or good judgement they were the species Eucalyptus globulus. Addis Ababa lies in a wide basin surrounded by rising land mainly to the north, and the trees were planted all across the hillside on the slopes of Mt. Entoto and eventually extending to about 3400 ha. This particular species of Eucalyptus thrives in the climate of Ethiopia and is now widely planted all over the country at the higher elevations. The species also has the useful property that it coppices well and so is ideal for fuelwood. The trees are cut when about 4–5 years old and produce 3–6 new shoots that can be cut again after another 4–5 years. An army of mainly elderly women collects most of the fuelwood and carries it in large bundles down to the market every day. By the mid-1980s the “Green Belt” had become very degraded due to overcutting and failure to replant dead stumps, while the population of Addis Ababa had grown enormously, increasing demand. As a result the World Bank stepped in with a large loan to finance restoration and expansion of the planted area. The expansion took place on degraded grassland some way out of the City to the East.

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In the mid-1980s the tobacco industry was under fire from environmental activists for contributing to deforestation for using large amounts of fuelwood for curing tobacco. As a result they commissioned an independent study of fuelwood by the industry Fraser (1986). This study investigated the situation in seven major tobacco producing countries: two in South America, three in Africa and two in Asia. The results showed that there was widespread ignorance among tobacco farmers about how to extract the most energy from the wood. The curing barns, in which the tobacco is hung for curing, have a large wood burning stove at the base and a flue that passes through the barn in a spiral to distribute the heat. The study involved careful measurement of the stacks of wood to be used in a sample curing cycle prior to the curing, including sampling for wood density and moisture content, and then measuring the wood remaining after the cure to determine how much had been consumed. The cured tobacco was also weighed so that the quantity of fuelwood required to cure a kilogram of tobacco could be determined. The result showed wide variation ranging from as low as 2 kg per kg tobacco to 230 kg per kg tobacco. The farmers that did not dry their wood in advance used the higher values. When this was discussed with them it turned out that they had the impression that wet wood burnt for a longer period and so they did not have to stoke the boiler so often. However, in order to maintain the fire they had to keep the doors of their stoves open to provide enough air for the combustion and achieve the necessary temperature. When they burnt dry wood it certainly burnt more quickly with the doors open, but they were unaware that it would burn much longer and much hotter with the doors closed to restrict the air supply and establish a pyrolytic reaction as in charcoal making. Burning dry wood with a limited air supply once the temperature reaches about 400 °C is the most efficient way to extract the energy, as all the volatiles are also burnt and there is very little pollution. Wood has the advantage over all other domestic fuels, except peat, that it can be harvested and prepared by an individual family or community

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

to their own requirements. If cultivated locally, trees can be grown on short rotations of 3–10 years to 10–20  cm diameter and 5–10  m tall, which thus require a minimum of additional conversion apart from cross-cutting to render them easy to transport and suitable for burning. Felling small sized trees is straightforward with hand tools or a chainsaw and animals or farm tractors can be used to drag bundles of small trees to a convenient landing. Cross-cutting can be done with a hand saw or on a larger scale with tractor mounted circular saw and no further splitting is required if small trees are used. For larger consumers such as an institution or a factory, wood chips may be preferable and there are now available a number of mobile chipping machines which can reduce the tree stems to a uniform size suitable for a self-stoking boiler. Several models of mobile chipper are available which are claimed to be able to chip about 5 tonnes per hour of wood so that one machine can produce sufficient chips to provide a continuous output equivalent to about 4 MW.

Wood Energy Conversion Technology The simplest way to extract energy from wood is to burn it on an open fire, but that is very inefficient and also very polluting. In many developing countries there have been successful programmes to introduce more efficient cooking stoves of various designs. In order to reduce pollution of the air by noxious gases from combustion and fine particles it is preferable to burn the wood in an enclosed stove with a control mechanism for the air supply and a flue to take the exhaust outside. With proper combustion there should be little more than water vapour in the exhaust if all the volatiles are burnt. The World Bank (2018) sponsored a project in Bangladesh to address the problem of Indoor Air Pollution, which produced a very good technical manual on the construction and operation of seven different designs of improved cooking stove. Some of the designs have flues to take all the exhaust gases out of the house and all provide

means of controlling the air supply to improve the efficiency of combustion. Until recently wood has been used as an industrial fuel mainly by wood industries that have ready access to an abundant supply of low cost fuel. In the USA, it has been estimated that about 30% of the residues generated by the wood processing industry are used for energy, with much of the rest being used for composite panels (Anonymous 2014). For domestic users who need space heating rather than cooking there is a wide choice of commercially available appliances that can burn wood but there is rarely information on their efficiency and each model has different requirements for fuel in the way of preferred length and diameter. The choice broadly ranges between stoves which are individual room heaters relying mainly on radiation and convection, through boilers with water jackets to provide heat for small bore water or hot air central heating systems to ranges of various types which also can be used for cooking. A single stove, with an output of 4–6  kWh capable of heating a large room, will use about 3–4 tonnes of wood annually, while a boiler or range with an output between 25 and 30  kWh will use 10–15 tonnes of wood annually under upland conditions in Britain so that maintaining and storing an adequate supply of wood may cause problems for some but in rural areas should not cause difficulties. For industries or local authority establishments such as schools and hospitals there are a number of larger boilers that can provide either process or space heat or steam. Most are normally supplied with self-stoking equipment which means that wood can be converted to chips, and stored in a hopper which increases capital costs, but the degree of automation so obtained greatly reduces the cost of tending the equipment. In the past few years, fluidised bed technology has been developed to a point where a number of models are commercially available which can burn wood and they have the advantage that they can handle green chips more efficiently than the traditional boilers.

Other Non-timber Forest Products

The more conventional types of boiler generally employ a spreader stoker and fairly large lumps of wood in the range 3–5 cm are preferred compared with the fluidised bed system which requires small chips around 1 cm. A third system available to the larger establishment is a wood gasification plant which can use wood or other waste organic matter to produce a low calorific value gas suitable for driving a diesel generator. The conversion efficiency for the gas generator is claimed to be about 75% and overall efficiency is 25–30% so that a plant consuming 20 tonnes per day of dry wood will give about 1 MW of electricity. Such a plant has been installed on an island on the South Pacific and primary term box and may offer some advantages. Other technologies are currently being developed to produce a high calorific value gas, which could be comparable with Natural (“North Sea”) gas and a range of liquid fuels such as methanol or a heavier fuel oil. Plants are in operation using these processes in the USA and Brazil but it is likely to be a few years before the technology has been refined enough to make the economics attractive.

Other Non-timber Forest Products A few countries collect data on the production of a few non-timber forest products other than fuelwood and charcoal that are traded internationally, such as Bamboo, Rattan, Gaharu and Brazil nuts. Bamboo and Rattan are the most widely produced non-timber forest products, other than fuelwood and are extensively used and traded. Bamboo is widely used in its raw state for house building, scaffolding and fencing and is also processed into a wide variety of products including pulp for paper, panel products, flooring, furniture and charcoal. FAO (2005) estimates that about 30% of the Bamboo growing stock is outside the forest in plantations, gardens and on waste ground, and at the present there does not seem to be concern about over-exploitation of the resource. They also estimated that the total area

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of Bamboo in Asia, Africa and America was about 38 million ha with a total growing stock of about 390 million tonnes in Asia and Africa. There is no data for America. Their estimate of annual production was 1.44 million tonnes, split more or less equally between raw bamboo poles and pulp, with small quantities for bamboo shoots, utensils and other minor products. The production figures, if accurate, represent only 0.3% of the growing stock, which if correct is probably sustainable. However, Paul (2013) reports that climate change is affecting Bamboo production in North-east India due to erratic rainfall. The Bamboo in the region appears to be flowering more frequently, after which it dies off and takes time to regrow. By contrast, according to Hirschberger (2011) Rattan is under considerable threat and is being heavily over-exploited. The main producers of Rattan are Indonesia and Malaysia and the resource is declining due to loss of forest and illegal harvesting. This appears to be having an impact on trade, which has declined sharply since 2006. The main importer of Rattan is China, but Singapore and Vietnam also import raw Rattan poles and export furniture. Very little is known about many of the products that are collected for subsistence or are sold in  local markets for cash. A walk round many rural markets in areas where there is still natural forest will usually reveal a wide range of animals, birds, insects, plants and fungi collected from the local forest on sale (see Plate 9.2). Wollenberg and Nawir (1999) reviewed a number of studies conducted in different parts of the tropics between 1988 and 1997 and found a very wide range of estimates of income from non-timber forest products ranging from US$31.8 per family in Sri Lanka to US$4696 per ha in Venezuela. This latter study was mainly of bushmeat from hunting. The contribution to household income ranged from 8% to 40%. Foppes and Samontry (2010) studied the value of non-timber forest products in production forest in Lao PDR and concluded that plant species contributed US$489  in subsistence value per household and US$204 per household in cash income. They also found that fish and other

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

Plate 9.2 Non-timber forest products for sale in a local market in southern Lao PDR

aquatic products that depended on forest had a value per household of US$477. The cash income was 39% of all cash income. The authors noted that there has been a declining trend in the harvest of many non-timber forest products due to forest degradation. These figures are supported by a study conducted for the Asian Development Bank by Champassak University in Lao PDR (Phommathon et al. 2010), who surveyed 15 villages and 303 households in the southern Provinces of Attapeu and Sekong. They found that the average annual value of all non-timber forest products from plants, wildlife hunting and fishing in forest streams was US$958 per household. The study was part of a Contingent Valuation to assess the overall value that local communities attached to the forest. There are many studies that estimate the income that rural households obtain from harvesting non-timber forests products, but there seem to be very few that have measured the quantities both consumed by forest communities and sold for cash. The study by Phommathom et al. (op. cit.) also measured the quantity of the 15 most commonly used products and found that an average of 119 kg per household was used for domestic consumption. Another study by Mitchell et al. (2003) in Bihar and Orissa States in Eastern India measured the collection and

consumption of the 20 most commonly used products and found that the average household consumption was 130  kg with a further 143  kg per household being collected for cash sale. Two other studies, one in Kenya (Kiplagat et al. 2008) and (Suba and Sundriyal 2013) in Arunachal Pradesh in India report 743  kg and 753  kg per household for a more limited number of products, but excluding fuelwood. The latter study was with Tribal communities that are almost totally dependent on the forest for their livelihood. According to the Forest People’s Programme (Chao 2012), there are a total of about 550 million people who are very dependent on forests for their livelihood, of which about 36% are indigenous peoples and the rest are rural communities that live within or beside forests. This number of people probably represents about 100 million households. Using the lower figure of about 270 kg per household for domestic plus cash use, from the study in India (Mitchell op.  cit.), the total world annual harvest of non-­ timber forest products could be as much as 27 million tonnes. This is a figure that urgently needs to be verified and corrected, because without such information it is impossible to know whether or not non-timber forest products are being harvested sustainably. In fact details of the harvest of non-timber forest products should be

Forest Grazing

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reported for each forest management unit so that the prevailing daily wage rate. This suggests that the intensity of harvest per unit area of forest can collectors of non-timber forest products for sale be ascertained. could benefit from establishing cooperatives Peters (1996) points out that harvesting of within administrative Districts or possibly non-timber forest products will have an impact Provinces to handle the processing and marketing on the ecology of the forest from where they are of some of their products so that they retain a collected. If harvesting is too intense, it can bigger proportion of the financial benefit. The reduce the vigour of the species harvested, example of Doi Tung cited earlier is a good decrease the  rate of seedling establishment, example of this approach. reduce the nutrients available for the growth of In southern Vietnam, the tree species the forest and reduce the food supply for some of Melaleuca occurs naturally, and is also cultivated the wild animal population. and local people use simple stills to extract the Harvesting of non-timber forest products can aromatic oils from the foliage. They mainly sell lead to forest degradation if it exceeds the their produce at the roadside as there is sufficient reproductive capacity of the forest and there are passing trade for them to make a living (see Plate already some non-timber forest products, such as 9.3). Gaharu, that are scarce because of over-­ harvesting, driven by an export trade. Forest inventories should include measure- Forest Grazing ments of as many as possible of the species that are harvested for non-timber forest products. For One form of non-timber forest product that is plant species the measurements need to cover the rarely mentioned is grazing of domestic livestock. parts of the plant that are harvested, such as foli- In many countries various domestic livestock are age, fruit and bark and for wildlife, the number of allowed to graze in forest areas. In Europe, goats animals present. Such measurements need to be are very common, and in most other parts of the repeated periodically to monitor any changes that world it is predominantly cattle. In South-east are occurring due either to harvesting or possibly Asia households typically have two or more climate change. In some situations, especially cattle and they are allowed to roam freely in where the forest has been degraded and human nearby forest. In New Zealand, Smale et  al. populations have grown, the harvesting may need (2008) studied the long-term impact of cattle to be controlled by a licencing system to ensure grazing on indigenous forests. They found that in sustainability. forest where cattle had been grazed for a long Some non-timber forest products need to be period the canopy height and density, under-­ processed to render them suitable for human storey density, numbers of small and medium consumption. Drying is relatively straightforward, sized trees and ground litter all decreased, while but extraction of oils or flavours or other the amount of ground vegetation and bare soil chemicals from plant parts is more complicated increased. In Peru, Piana et al. studied the impact and at present is most often done well outside the of cattle grazing in a protected area on the raptor forest. This is usually because large quantities are population. They also reported a general reducneeded and have to be collected from many forest tion in canopy height associated with grazing and areas. Marketing of small quantities is also found that it had an impact on raptor populations. problematic. This means that the forest Raptor species that hunted in open ground benecommunities get little benefit from the sale of the fitted, while those that perched to watch for their products, with middlemen often capturing a prey suffered. In Scotland, areas where deer popsubstantial proportion of the benefit. The study ulations are maintained for stalking tree regenerby Mitchell (op. cit.) also investigated the return ation are non-existent, but respond rapidly to to labour from harvesting non-timber forest reductions in the deer population, or fencing to products and found that it was generally less than protect regeneration.

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9  Sustainability of the Supply of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

Plate 9.3  Small homemade still for extracting oil from Melaleuca leaves in southern Vietnam

Many tree species provide good fodder for livestock, and it is preferable that they are cultivated in silvo-pastoral systems, with either free

range grazing or cut and carry with stall feeding, than having cattle roaming in forest where they trample and feed on young regeneration.

10

Illegal Logging

Definition of Illegal Logging Illegal logging is variously defined, but here is taken to be any logging that is not consistent with an authorised harvesting or management plan based on sustainability of the forest growing stock and proper consideration of the environmental services provided by the forest. It can be conducted by legitimate concession holding companies that knowingly harvest more than the approved volumes, harvest outside the areas approved for harvest or re-harvest an area already logged before the approved time. Local and foreign companies that are involved in timber processing that do not have a concession may log illegally or sponsor organised gangs to log wherever they can get access. In some countries, individual farmers are allowed to fell a few trees for their own use, but abuse this privilege by selling their logs to timber companies or other traders.

Extent of Illegal Logging It is difficult to assess the extent of illegal logging and there are many anecdotal accounts of it in many countries. In Indonesia during the course of the Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Programme mentioned earlier, it became appar-

ent that illegal logging was a major issue and so various attempts were made to establish the scale of the problem. Three different approaches were adopted that in the end gave very similar results. The first looked at the size and performance of the wood processing industry and the likely demand for logs. It turned out that the government data covered only the large, mainly export oriented concession holding companies and their estimate of the annual harvest was based on the royalty payments made by those companies. No account was taken of the domestic demand for wood products, nor of the very large number of small, often unlicenced, sawmills that supplied the local market. The Programme organised a survey of these sawmills in a number of provinces to establish their likely log requirements (see Plate 10.1). An attempt was also made to estimate the size of the domestic market for wood products using secondary data such as house construction and furniture making and interviews with timber traders. The third approach was to look closely at the on-­ going forest inventory data, which threw up a number of issues. The inventory was using LANDSAT images to classify and measure forest areas and the interpretation included information on the extent of logged over forest, which is easily distinguishable in the satellite images. The total recorded area of logged forest was substantially higher than the area that would have been

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_10

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10  Illegal Logging

Plate 10.1  Small unlicenced riverside sawmill in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, that processes illegal logs

logged to meet the annual recorded log production since the records began. The data on the recorded log production, the timber processing inputs and outputs and the domestic demand for timber products were input to the supply–demand balance model described above and indicated a deficit of about 50 million cubic metres annually in the log supply compared with the apparent consumption. The conclusion from this was that unrecorded, and therefore probably illegal, logging accounted for a larger volume of logs than the officially recorded log harvest. The later was closely correlated with the recorded export data for logs, sawn timber and plywood, but took no account of the domestic demand for wood products. Even though per capita consumption of wood products was low, as in most developing countries, the population of around 200 million at the time resulted in very substantial demand. In other parts of South-east Asia illegal logging is rampant and is causing serious degrada-

tion of the forest resources as well as depriving the countries involved of Important revenue that could be used for education and healthcare for the population. An example is given in Box 10.1, and see also Plate 10.2. Box 10.1 Illegal Cross-Border Trade in Logs Between Lao PDR and Vietnam

Illegal Cross-Border Trade in Logs In Vietnam during the early 2000s the government was promoting the expansion of the wood processing industry for export as part of its drive to diversify and expand the economy. The Asian Development Bank was preparing a forestry sector project at the time, part of which was an analysis of the economic performance of the sector that included an estimate of the supply and demand for wood raw material (Fraser (continued)

Extent of Illegal Logging

2003). The analysis suggested that the total demand for industrial roundwood was around 10 million cubic metres roundwood equivalent. Of this, about 1.2 million cubic metres was produced in the national forests and the equivalent of about 1.8 cubic metres was imported in the form of pulp and paper and a few other wood products which left an unexplained deficit of about 7 million cubic metres roundwood. Some of this was coming from illegal felling in the country’s forests, but much was coming from illegal logging in neighbouring Lao PDR and Cambodia and from unrecorded imports of logs from other countries. A few years later, Meyfroidt and Lambin (2009) carried out a similar analysis looking at the timber supply and demand over the period from 1995 to 2005 and came to a similar conclusion. Their analysis showed

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that illegal imports of logs had risen steadily rising over the period and in 2001 was around 3 million cubic metres . In 2011 the Environmental Investigation Agency published a report on the illegal log trade between Lao PDR and Vietnam, which did not give overall quantities but showed that the trade was both large and still active. The REDD+ Preparation Proposal for Lao PDR prepared in 2012 included an analysis of the changes in the growing stock during the period 2000–2010 based on national forest inventories. This showed that the total growing stock had been declining by about 12 million  cubic metres annually over the period. The officially recorded production of logs was 440,000 cubic metres. Some of the reduction in growing stock was the result of land clearance, but the majority was illegal logging, driven mainly by illegal exports to `Vietnam and Thailand.

Plate 10.2  Illegal logs about to cross the border from Lao PDR to Vietnam

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This type of cross-border illegal trade has implications for REDD+ and efforts to reduce emissions of Greenhouse gases, as it begs the question as to which country is responsible for the emissions resulting from the forest degradation: the producer or the consumer? The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and INTERPOL produced a report on illegal logging around the world (Nellerman 2012) and listed 10 ways in which illegal logging can be conducted. It also listed 20 ways in which illegally felled logs can be laundered to conceal their origin and pass them off as coming from sustainably managed forests. The report is a useful and informative overview of illegal logging in tropical forests, but it focuses on the large-scale operations linked to international trade and does not deal with the small-scale operations that supply domestic markets where there is little concern about the origin of the timber. The report quotes sources that estimate that illegally felled logs may account for between 50 and 90% of all logs harvested in some countries and 15–30% of all logs harvested. The examples described above for Indonesia and Lao PDR support this assessment as do the estimates derived from the analysis of the FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment 2015, which suggests that illegal logs account for about 30% additional log harvest to that reported to FAO (see Chap. 9).

Drivers of Illegal Logging The immediate and obvious driver of illegal logging is an imbalance between the supply of logs from sustainably managed sources and the demand for timber and wood products. This in turn can be because an excess of wood processing capacity has either been authorised or has just grown to meet local demand. In many countries the responsibility for regulating and promoting the wood processing industry lies in a Ministry of Industry, which does not coordinate with the agency responsible for forestry, which may in turn be spread over two or more Ministries. There can often be a contradiction between the policies

10  Illegal Logging

of Industry and Forestry, with the former wanting to expand and export to create jobs and earn revenue, while the latter may be wanting to restrict harvesting to conserve the forest and maintain environmental services. In some countries trees are felled and then reduced to planks with chainsaws in order to facilitate transporting from the forest to the local market. This sort of illegal logging is small scale, and is difficult to detect, but can have a serious impact through degradation of the forests. See Plate 10.3. These fundamental problems are exacerbated by a combination of some of the following: • poverty both in the population at large and in government funding, • corruption, • unclear or ambiguous forest laws and regulations, • lack of respect for the law, poor law enforcement and inadequate penalties for law-breaking, • capacity weaknesses in government due to lack of staff numbers and levels of education and training, especially at lower levels in the administrative hierarchy, • influence in government by big business and powerful individuals, • badly prepared concession agreements and lack of clear definition of concession areas, • ill-defined or non-existent forest boundaries and management units, • organised crime, • inadequate monitoring of forest operations and log transport • lack of public awareness of the problem and its consequences so that there is little political pressure to do anything about it. It will not be possible to tackle all these issues at once, but getting a balance between supply and demand within a country will greatly reduce the incentive to log illegally and will give time for some of the issues like capacity building and regulatory instruments to be rectified. It may mean closing down some industry in the short term and

Impact of Illegal Logging

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Plate 10.3  Small-scale illegal felling and conversion of trees in Indonesia

investment in plantations that will take some years to have a positive impact. Wood processing facilities should be licenced and a condition of a licence should be that there is adequate raw material available on a sustainable basis. Pulpmills, for example, should not be constructed until there are adequate plantations available to meet their requirements, even if this means substantial investment several years ahead of the mill becoming operational. This will not be popular with pulp and paper companies, but it will oblige them to seek ways of funding their operations. In the USA in the 1980s there was a move by many of the big pulp and paper companies to divest themselves of their plantations, because they had low rates of return which reduced the company’s overall rate of return. One reason for this was the very low transfer price for logs from the plantations to the mill, which reduced the apparent return from the plantations and boosted the return from the pulping operations. Some companies attempted to sell their plantations to pension funds, for which a steady income flow in the long term was an attractive proposition, but the low price offered for the pulpwood acted as a deterrent.

Impact of Illegal Logging Illegal logging has a similar impact on forest ecosystems as legal logging, but usually much worse. Concession holders involved in legal logging activities are increasingly using Low Impact Logging techniques, which involve careful planning of access roads, tracks and skid trails based on identification and location of the trees to be harvested, preparation of the trees to be felled by removing climbers and sometimes major branches before felling to minimise damage to neighbouring trees, careful choice of the felling direction and remedial action after felling to reduce run-off from roads and other places where the soil has been disturbed. Illegal loggers generally do none of these things and so cause excessive damage to the residual trees and increase the risk of erosion through canopy opening and exposure of the soil. The canopy opening often results in a profusion of climbers that eventually kill much of the residual stand. In many cases, illegal logging is carried out in forest that has already been logged over, so that

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young regeneration is damaged or destroyed, and the growing stock is reduced to a level where it cannot recover through growth within a reasonable time-frame. Once degraded to this extent the forest becomes a target for clearance and conversion to agriculture or plantations. When illegal logging is carried out inside Protected Areas it has a very negative impact on the wildlife and can have similar consequences to those mentioned under legal harvesting of timber and non-timber forest products above, which can favour some species at the expense of others by subtle changes in the habitat.

Combatting Illegal Logging Most of the effort so far to reduce illegal logging has focussed on the international trade aspects, especially by the European Union and the USA. The former established the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action plan in 2003 and the latter amended the Lacey Act (1900) in 2008 to include trade in plants and plant parts, including timber. Under the Lacey Act, timber importers can be fined heavily for importing illegally sourced timber, even if they are unaware that it is illegal. Importers are required by the Act to verify themselves, and not through third parties, that the timber and timber products that they are importing have been legally harvested. The FLEGT operates through negotiated Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) with exporting countries. The exporting country, with financial and technical assistance from the EU, registers companies that are operating legally and this enables them to export to Europe. Europe also has the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR) that requires importers and end-users to procure timber only from sustainably managed sources. These instruments have been effective in raising awareness of the importance of avoiding illegally felled timber, but they may have had the perverse effect of increasing illegal logging in the producer countries. This is because facilitating export of timber products deprives the domestic

10  Illegal Logging

market of those same products. If the exports are using a high proportion of the sustainable supply the demand in the domestic market may then have to be met from illegally felled logs. Often different companies are involved in export to those that supply the domestic market. The former are often foreign owned, while the latter are often small local companies. The UNEP-INTERPOL report (2013 op. cit.) discusses at some length the steps needed to deal with the problem of illegal logging, which includes better law enforcement in the producer countries. This requires laws to be strengthened and for illegal logging to be made a criminal offence. It will also need staff training, improved investigative capacity and a strengthened judicial system with stronger penalties for law-breakers. It makes the key suggestion that there is a need to change the profit to risk ratio dramatically if any measure is to have an impact. These measures to improve law enforcement would increase the risks considerably but do not address the profit side of the equation, which needs to be reduced substantially, but is much more difficult to achieve. Imposing requirements for Low Impact Logging and Certification on legitimate operators is fine, but it has the effect of increasing their costs, which pushes up the price of legitimate logs. This in turn has the effect of increasing the profit for the illegal loggers who can keep their harvesting costs to a minimum and do not bother with Certification or other ethical issues such as staff welfare and health and safety. They do, however, usually incur additional costs for bribery. As mentioned earlier, the UNEP-INTERPOL report also gives 20 ways in which illegal operators can launder illegal logs to enable them to be sold “legally”. These include hacking into official internet sites to create false documents, forging certificates and invoices, mixing batches of logs from different sources, using production from officially authorised tree plantations to hide illegal logs from natural forest and false reporting of sawmill conversion to hide the use of illegal logs. This would have the effect of increasing the apparent conversion efficiency of the sawmills concerned and may explain why the average

Technological Solutions

recovery from sawmills in tropical developing countries is only about 10% less than in developed countries. An interesting idea proposed in the UNEP-­ INTERPOL report is to establish check-points at bottlenecks in the transport routes from forest to mill and impose a levy on all logs being transported. Part of the proceeds from the levy would go to the staff of the check-point to reduce the risk of them being bribed, and a quota, determined by the authorised log harvest from the area would either be free of the levy or would have the levy refunded. Thus all logs over the quota would have to pay the levy, which would increase their cost and so reduce profitability for illegal loggers. In reality, the levy would have to be very high to avoid the risk that illegal loggers would pay a bribe to the check-point staff that was more than the staff’s share of the levy, but less than the full cost of the levy. The only effective way of reducing illegal logging is for the rich importing countries to reduce their consumption of wood products and establish enough plantations to ensure that the overall demand by producer and consumer country can be met from logs produced on a sustainable basis.

Technological Solutions In order to combat illegal logging it is essential to get real-time information on where and when it is taking place. Satellite imagery can be useful in detecting where it has taken place but the chances of capturing images while it is going on are low. An alternative or possibly complimentary technology is to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones. The

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technology has advanced rapidly in recent years and drones are readily available at a modest price. Some countries already use drones for aerial surveillance of, for example, coastal waters. Most suppliers provide operator training and it has the advantage that the operators are remote from the actual logging and thus at little risk of being attacked by the perpetrators. Used in combination with satellite detection, drones can be used to locate and photograph the logging while in progress and can then alert the authorities to deal with it appropriately. If the imagery shows that there are many people involved and heavy equipment is being used, it will be necessary to send a sizeable group, possibly including the police and/ or the military to apprehend the culprits. When illegal logging is suspected of taking place, either as a result of satellite images or reports from local communities, a drone can be deployed to obtain the exact location and the size of the group involved. The drone can either be directed to follow obvious extraction routes into the forest until it encounters evidence of the logging taking place or it can be directed to do systematic sweeps over the forest area. If the initial traverse of the area is at quite high altitude, a large area can be surveyed quickly and the chances of the drone being spotted by the loggers are reduced. Either zooming in with the camera or reducing the altitude can then give more detailed information about what is going on and how many are involved. If Forest Management Units have been created, each one can be equipped with a drone and regular surveillance can be carried out. Once some illegal loggers have been caught “red-­ handed” the word will go round and the knowledge that the forest is being regularly monitored will act as a deterrent to further activity.

Part IV Economic Issues

The Value of Timber and Non-­ timber Forest Products

 he Value of Forest for Production T of Timber If you owned a hectare of natural forest, almost anywhere in the world, and decided to clear it and sell as much as possible of the timber and other potential products, you would be lucky to get more than about US$5000–7000. If you decided to keep it as forest and harvest timber sustainably you could expect to earn about US$50–100 annually for the rest of your life. If you were living in Vietnam and decided to clear the forest, burn all the woody biomass and plant black pepper you could earn annually about 25 times that amount according to the data from the Asian Development Bank funded Forests for Livelihood Improvement in the Central Highlands Project (FLITCH) (ADB 2017). Selling the timber could be straight profit. If you were in Africa and planted Maize you would not do so well from the maize, with a profit of only about seven times that from the forest at about US$500 per  annum but you could still profit from the sale of timber (Burke et  al. 2011). If you lived in Brazil and decided to ranch cattle you could earn two to three times as much as that from the forest (Bowman et al. 2011). All these figures are just indicative and date from around 2011, but the relative levels of profit between the alternative land-uses are probably still similar and illustrate the problem of trying to conserve forest.

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Timber varies in price according to the species, log size and quality, so the stumpage value ranges from as low as US$3 per cubic metre for pulpwood to US$50–80 per cubic metre for a quality hardwood. An average price is around US$25–30 per cubic metre, which is US$20–25 per tonne. The black pepper price after deducting the harvesting costs from the farmgate price was from US$2100 to 3000 per tonne in 2017, while maize on the same basis was from US$160 to 340. It is more difficult to obtain prices for beef cattle but the Rabobank (2017) gives a farmgate price for live beef cattle in Brazil of around US$1500 per tonne. It is easy to see why people like to clear forest and grow other crops. However, the prices paid for these other crops do not include the environmental cost of producing them. These arise from the loss of the potential to produce timber and non-timber forest products leading to overharvesting and illegal logging in the remaining forest as well as the loss of environmental and ecological and other services that the forest could provide. There is also the cost of degradation of the land by soil erosion, pollution of the rivers with chemicals and emissions of methane gas by cattle that contributes to climate change. Unfortunately the market does not price any of these costs nor put a price on the values that are lost when forest is cleared. The relatively low value of timber also has an impact on the attractiveness of investing in plantations to deal with the problems of increasing

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_11

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demand for forest products and illegal logging. The question of the value of ecosystem services will be discussed in the next chapter.

Timber Harvesting The concept of sustainability is that the forest should be capable of replacing the quantity of products harvested periodically by growth of the remaining stock. This applies to selective logging of natural forest but the principle for plantations is the same, except that clear felling is a more usual way of managing plantations. In these circumstances the growing stock must be re-established by planting or natural regeneration and the period until the next harvest is determined by the time that it takes for the crop to replace the quantity harvested. This can be from as little as 5  years for some fast growing species to more than 50 years for valuable slow growing species where large size is important. There is a conflict between this principle and the market when selective logging is used, as is the case in most tropical forests, in that the optimum quantity of timber to harvest from a financial point of view is not always in accordance with the optimum quantity to harvest from an ecological point of view. Figure 11.1 shows how harvesting costs and revenues from the logs increase as the volume harvested per ha increases with conventional logging (A) and  Low Impact Logging (B). A commercial operator will harvest the most valuable trees first, so the revenue curve flattens off as less valuable trees are harvested, while the costs have an initial fixed amount in inventory and access construction and then rises at a slightly increasing rate as more trees are harvested. The maximum profitability for the operator is when the two lines are furthest apart, which is when about 30 cubic metres per ha have been harvested. This may not be the optimum from an ecological and silvicultural point of view. Harvesting less than about 12 cubic metres per ha will be done at a loss, unless there are some extremely valuable logs. For sustainable forest management, Low Impact Logging (B) must be applied and the

11  The Value of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

relationship between costs, revenues and volume harvested is similar, but there is a higher initial fixed cost due to the additional survey work required, but a slightly lower variable cost as time is saved in the extraction due to better planning. This raises the volume harvested that gives the maximum profitability to about 38 cubic metres per ha. The logging costs are also increased from about US$38 to 44  in the model used for the figure, and the minimum volume below which harvesting makes a loss rises to about 20  cubic metres per ha. These figures are based on representative logging data, but will vary considerable from place to place according to the quality of the forest, the terrain and the experience of the operator, but the principle still applies. For temperate coniferous forests, and plantations where clear felling is more commonly practiced the relationship between costs and revenues is similar with the maximum profit when about three quarters of the crop has been harvested (Fig. 11.2). The cost curve is slightly irregular because it is assumed that small trees are harvested as the fellers reach them and they are relatively slightly more costly to harvest. In both the tropical and temperate examples the harvesting cost, at the most profitable level of harvest in the former and for harvesting the whole crop in the latter, is about two-thirds of the value of the logs harvested. This means that the stumpage value of the logs is only about one-­ third of the average price that the end-user of the logs is likely to pay. This is the amount that has to be shared between the owner of the trees, which may be the state, an institution, a community or a private individual and the harvester of the logs. The harvester may be a contractor, who sells the logs to end-users or it may be the end-user who does the logging, but the owner of the trees needs to set a stumpage fee or royalty for the logs that allows the harvester to make a reasonable return on their investment, but deters rent-seeking behaviour. This can be quite difficult, and many government set royalties far too low, which encourages rent-seeking behaviour. One way to ensure that the owner of the trees gets the highest possible stumpage value is by

Timber Harvesting

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A

B

Fig. 11.1  Accumulated costs and revenues from harvesting (US$ per ha) and the volume harvested (m3 per ha) for conventional (A) and Low Impact Logging (B)

auctioning. This can sometimes be done by auctioning the standing trees and giving a contract to harvest to the highest bidder. It is also possible for the owner of the trees to do the harvesting and auction the logs. When a company is given a concession to harvest an area of forest it is more difficult to negotiate a fair price. If royalties are set too high it encourages the concessionaire to cream the forest for the best trees, and if they are set too low, it encourages illegal logging, waste, inefficiency and rent-seeking. In an ideal world, forest owners (state or private) should first create Management Units and then inventory them to determine the sustainable

level of harvest taking due consideration of the ecological and environmental issues such as setting aside areas of High Conservation Value and riparian forest. Invitations can then be sought from reputable companies to manage the unit for a reasonable period such as 20  years with the selected company being (in principle) the one that offers the highest annual rent for the unit. This avoids the need for a complicated system of royalties based on species and size classes. A contract can be awarded to the selected company that has provision for rent reviews at, say, 5 year intervals and the possibility of the contract being terminated for unsatisfactory performance. The

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Fig. 11.2  Accumulated costs and revenues from harvesting (US$ per ha) and the volume harvested (m3 per ha) for clear felling in temperate coniferous forests or plantations

idea of performance bonds was discussed earlier, but a well-written contract and regular reviews of performance are easier to do in practice.

Timber Values The discussion above has shown that timber values are very low in comparison with most other commodities. In view of the wide range of uses to which timber is put, and the high demand for timber forest products, it is difficult to explain why this should be so. The classic demand curve suggests that a low price is due to a plentiful supply, which could be explained by the prevalence of illegal logging, in the case of timber. Harvesting timber does not involve a huge capital investment in equipment, and as seen above typical harvesting costs are in the range US$10–50 per cubic metre (US$12–60 per tonne), with the higher costs being when Low Impact Logging is applied. This compares with an average for crude oil of about US$70 per tonne, ranging from US$20 to 200 per tonne. (Costs for oil are normally quoted in US$ per barrel which equals 0.144 tonnes).

The black pepper in Vietnam, referred to earlier, had a harvesting cost of about US$75 per tonne. The low value of timber has a number of important implications: (1) the revenue from selling standing trees for logging is very low for the owner of the trees, but very profitable for the harvester, (2) the returns from investing in plantations to meet future demand are very low, (3) the returns from managing natural forest sustainably are very low, and (4) it results in very inefficient processing with low levels of recovery and high levels of waste, both in the forest and in the factory especially in developing countries, which are increasingly seeking to do the maximum amount of processing for export products.

Plantations The fastest growing plantations with species such as Eucalyptus and Acacia in the tropics and sub-­ tropics and Salix and Populus in more temperate regions can be harvested for fuel or pulpwood in 7–10 years after planting. For the production of sawlogs 20 years at least is normally needed in

Plantations

the tropics and 30–50  years in the temperate regions. This has two important implications for policy and for achieving sustainability in forest management. First, action needs to be taken now to increase the area of plantations for timber production to meet demand from 2025 onwards. Second, the discount rate normally applied to investment means that with a relatively long period before harvesting and the current low timber prices the present value of the future harvest from plantations is low, which is a big disincentive to invest. The paradox is that increasing the supply with plantations will tend to keep log prices low until either illegal logging can be eliminated or there is no more forest left to be logged illegally. Only when the supply of logs can be controlled to a sustainable level will log prices begin to rise and so give an incentive to industry and the population at large to use the resource more efficiently and establish enough new plantations to meet growth in demand without destroying any more natural forest. There is a grave risk that much of the valuable tropical forest will be lost by the time this happens. Plantations are by far the most efficient way to produce timber and wood fibre, and there are a few examples of the use of genetically selected improved trees that have raised yields to levels many times higher than the average. Greater plantation productivity means a smaller area needs to be covered in plantations. The problem for expanding tree plantations is that they have to compete for land with a range of other commodity crops such as oil palm and rubber and arable crops such as cassava and maize. With all these crops there is really no alternative source of supply other than the cultivated ones, unlike timber crops where there is always the alternative of the natural forest. The price of the commodity crops fluctuates in line with the global balance between supply and demand. As demand outstrips supply, the price rises and that provides an incentive to expand the area cultivated. When the new crops start producing supply outstrips demand and the prices fall for a bit until demand grows and again begins to exceed the supply. When the crop price is high

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it is very difficult to resist the pressure to plant more, which often means clearing more forest. With timber tree plantations the price generally remains relatively low, although locally, the establishment of a new wood processing facility can give a temporary boost to the price of logs. As Table 9.3 shows the roundwood requirements of the sawnwood, plywood and veneer sub-sector of the industry is about the same as that of the pulp industry. The latter is produced in a total of 51 countries, of which 21 have large mills producing more than 1 million tonnes annually. There are 24 tropical developing countries that produce pulp, of which 6 are major producers. The other 18 tropical developing countries are small pulp producers but appear to have an annual deficit of around 22 million cubic metres of small roundwood for their industry. If this is the case it will probably be driving illegal logging as the wood must be coming from somewhere, unless the pulp production figures are inaccurate. Pulpwood can generally be grown with fast growing species on short rotations and more or less the whole crop can be utilised. The deficit of pulpwood in the developing countries could be met from between 1 and 2 million ha of plantations, depending on the productivity achieved, which is also dependent on the quality of the land that might be available. With an average cost for establishing and maintaining a plantation in tropical developing countries of US$1000–1500 per ha a total investment of between US$1 and 3 billion is required. This would be a small price to pay for reducing the incentive to log illegally. It is difficult from the global statistics to do an accurate supply/demand balance as some small roundwood may be used for composite panel production and in some countries local sawmills use quite small sizes of log. 155 countries produce non-coniferous sawnwood and 112 produce coniferous sawnwood. The former produce 176 million cubic metre of sawnwood from a total of 467 million cubic metres of logs, including imports, whereas the latter produce 376 million cubic metres of sawnwood from 780 million cubic metres of logs including imports, which is a recovery of 43%

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and 48%, respectively. Conifer logs are generally more uniform than non-­coniferous logs, which probably accounts for the difference in recovery factors. Out of the 112 countries producing non-­ coniferous products 35 have a deficit of raw material totalling 282 million cubic metres. In the countries with an apparent deficit the recovery figures are more than 100%, based on the reported production figures and the reported availability of logs including imports. This is clearly impossible and indicates a deficit. The size of the deficit is calculated by assuming a recovery of 50% and comparing the volume of logs that would be required with the reported domestic log production and imports in each country. If the overall industry recovery factor for the conversion of non-coniferous logs to products was increased to 50% from the current 43%, it would reduce the deficit by about 116 million cubic metres, which would be a lot cheaper than establishing enough plantations to produce the same amount of raw material. About 8–10 million ha of new plantations would be needed to reduce the deficit by that amount and it would take 15–30 years to achieve at a cost of at least US$8– 15 billion. The combined deficit for pulpwood logs and sawlogs is about 305 million cubic metres, which needs to be addressed urgently if the continued loss of forest is to be halted. Unfortunately the largest proportion of the deficit is in sawlogs and veneer logs, which take the longest time to produce in plantations, and is probably why so much primary and logged over tropical forest is being logged illegally. Some small sawmills do use small roundwood, but the recovery is generally low and the product quality is poor. Plantations have a bad reputation for being boring monocultures that are not good for the environment as they use too much water and have limited biodiversity. These criticisms are partly justified, but can be addressed by giving more thought to their design and spending a little more money on their establishment. There are trade-­ offs between planting density, establishment costs and the need for thinning, especially with crops that are to be grown on a relatively long

rotation for a mixture of sawlogs and pulpwood. By inter-planting the main crop with a short lived species that improves the soil by nitrogen fixation, such as Calliandra, Sesbania or Leucaena in the tropics or Alnus or Robinia in temperate regions, the need for an early and probably uneconomic thinning and the heavy branching that usually happens in low-density plantations are avoided or at least reduced. Novak (2017) reviews current research in France with a wide range of tree species that can be used as fodder for livestock, which includes those mentioned above as well as species of Salix, Morus, Ulmus, Tilia, Pyrus and Sorbus. It also improves the appearance of the plantation and helps to improve the biodiversity. The three species mentioned as examples for the tropics are also useful fodder species and cooperation with local farmers to allow them to collect fodder for their livestock can benefit local communities in addition to any local employment generated by the plantations as well as possibly generating some income in the early years of the plantation. Another technique that has been applied by at least one European forest product company in a tropical area, referred to in Chap. 6 in relation to rural poverty, is to plant the trees very close together in rows wide apart such as 1  m in the rows and 10  m between the rows. This allows local farmers to cultivate crops between the rows of trees for 1–3  years, which benefits both the trees and the farmers, without reducing the yield from the trees. Commercial companies tend to establish plantations in large blocks in order to achieve economise of scale. However, in many countries it is very difficult to find large blocks of land that are available and suitable for plantations, so it makes sense to establish many smaller blocks within a wider landscape. Although this may increase costs to some extent it has some advantages in reducing the risk of losses due to fire and disease and is less disruptive of the local agricultural economy, while possibly providing some useful environmental benefits such as shade and shelter and some soil protection. Faruqi et  al. (2018) describe 14 companies that are adopting innovative approaches to restoration of degraded land in a number of

Bioprospecting

countries. These include some of the approaches described above as well as such technologies as the use of drones for distributing and planting tree seed in a capsule with some growing medium and biodegradable pots that can hold a water supply to get seedlings established. Others are focussing more on the marketing of novel forest products to promote interest in and funding for reforestation. Maintaining or establishing riparian forest along watercourses can also help to break up large expanses of monocultures and support biodiversity, as can planting a variety of indigenous species along roads and access routes. The main problem to be overcome in expanding the area of plantations is the relatively low rate of return, especially for the longer rotation crops needed to produce sawlogs because of the low market price for logs. If the stumpage value for sawlogs in 30  years remains at current levels of around US$30 per cubic metre for sawlogs and US$5 per cubic metre for pulpwood, as discussed above, and the yield is 15  cubic metres per ha per  annum, then the harvest in 30  years will be around 240 cubic metres of sawlogs and 80 cubic metres of pulpwood, plus about 120 cubic metre of pulpwood from thinning assumed to be in years 15, 20 and 25 for this example. Discounting this revenue stream to the present at 10% gives a Present Value of about US$470 per ha, which is not enough to cover the establishment costs. These costs will depend on the site conditions but excluding the cost of the land and are unlikely to be less than US$1500 per ha. In countries where land is mainly state land an annual rent will probably be charged and even with a relatively modest rent of US$5 per ha per  annum the Internal Rate of Return is only about 6.2%. Even with the low interest rates that are prevailing at the present time (2018) in Europe and North America this low rate of return is not likely to be attractive to many investors, especially in view of the long period before revenue is received. Even if pulpwood prices were to increase to US$10 per cubic metre and sawlogs to US$50 per cubic metre, the Internal Rate of Return would still only be 8.4%.

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If credits can be earned for carbon sequestration, then the returns from the plantations are dramatically improved. With the lower timber prices the return from timber plus carbon is 14% and with the higher timber prices is 15%. This is with the current market price for carbon dioxide of US$7.40 per tonne, and assumes that the carbon credits are paid annually and that credits that have been paid for any timber harvested in thinnings will be paid back when they are harvested and at the end of the rotation when the final crop is felled. Depending on the use of the crop, it may not be necessary to pay back all the credits if some of the output is to be put to a use with a long life cycle. The calculations do not include the transaction cost of establishing an arrangement for the payment of the carbon credits and for regular third party monitoring and it is not yet clear that all plantations will qualify for such carbon credits because of the “additionality” requirement. The same argument applies to natural forest, where harvesting is also likely to be on a long cycle such as 30 years, but yields will be much lower than from plantations, but the value of the carbon stock and sequestration will be higher.

Bioprospecting Very many of the non-timber forest products are used by local communities for medicines, flavours and fragrances and other uses such as pesticides, latexes and dyes. The Convention on Biological Diversity recognises the property rights of countries to their biological genetic resources. It also encourages equitable sharing of knowledge and financial benefits from the exploitation of these resources between countries as a means of giving them an economic value that will help to ensure their protection and conservation. Bioprospecting can follow one of two possible approaches: the first is to investigate local knowledge of all the plant or animal species that are used by communities for different purposes and collect samples for chemical analysis. The other approach is to take small samples from all

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the different parts of all the plants in a specified area (shoot, roots, leaves, bark, flowers and seed) and do an initial chemical screening to find out what types of bio-chemical are present. Unusual ones or ones that belong to a group of chemicals that are known to have useful properties are then sampled in bigger batches for more detailed analysis. If that results in a bio-chemical with interesting properties a bigger sample is required to extract enough of the chemical for clinical trials. Most bio-chemicals fail at one or other of these stages, but a very small proportion gets to the point where they can be marketed for a particular use. Those that reach this final stage can generate large streams of revenue. This latter approach requires that the (forest) area from which the samples are taken remains intact so that further larger samples of the same plant (tree) and others of the same species can be collected to investigate the variability of the chemical composition. In the past, bioprospecting has had a poor reputation, because of failures on the part of the prospectors to give any recompense to either the owners of the knowledge about the potential usefulness of particular biological resources or the owners of the resource itself, despite sometimes having made huge profits from its commercialisation. This has changed somewhat as a result of the Convention on Biological Diversity and a number of countries have established protocols for interested parties to have access to their biological genetic resources in exchange for an agreed sharing of any future commercial benefits that may arise. There are three issues surrounding the sharing of the benefits that may arise from bioprospecting; the first of which is the ownership of the resource, the second is access to the resource and the third is local knowledge of potential uses for particular resources. The first two depend on the

11  The Value of Timber and Non-timber Forest Products

national policy regarding the ownership of land and especially forests. If the forests have been declared as state forests, then the government is likely to want to claim all of any financial benefits that may come from any discovery. It will also be the government that can agree to authorising access to particular areas where resources may be found. Local knowledge also presents problems if it is already widely available among many communities. Millum (2016) discusses these issues and refers to the International Cooperative Biological Groups as an example of current best practice. He argues that Free Prior Informed Consent should be negotiated with local communities about their knowledge of the uses and benefits of particular biological resources, which would include some share of any future financial outcome. There is always the problem that a bio-chemical extracted from an organism that the community has recommended does not become commercialised, either because it fails clinical trials or an alternative is found that is more effective. Kusser et  al. (2006) describe their approach, which is to do as much as possible of the research and development in the country that has the resource so that they benefit both by sharing fully in all the knowledge that is generated as well as having nationals trained in all the techniques that are used. Ding et al. (2007) describe a number of contracts that were agreed between government agencies in developing countries that had official access to the biological resources and international companies that wished to prospect for new bio-chemicals to develop commercially. If more countries establish procedures to facilitate bioprospecting that are not too complicated and bureaucratic it could help to raise interest in, and awareness of, the value of biodiversity and help with its sustainability and conservation.

Valuation of Forest Ecosystem, Environmental and Social Services

 orest Ecological Functions F and Values The most important ecological function of forest is the provision of habitat for a multitude of species from five out of the six kingdoms into which living organisms are classified. The biological resources that are found in forests have three types of value: (1) a direct financial/economic value determined by the market, (2) an existence value, which can be thought of as the cost of not having any biodiversity and (3) an indirect value such as through attracting and giving a raison d’être for ecotourism. The direct value has already been discussed in connection with the collection, use and marketing of a wide range of no-timber forest products. The monetary value of these resources varies greatly from place to place depending both on the type and condition of the forest, and on the level of knowledge and use that local populations make of the resource. In tropical areas it is generally relatively poor local communities that make the greatest use of these resources and may be very dependent on them for their livelihood and survival. In the more prosperous temperate countries the collection of fungi and berries is more often the pursuit of better-educated and wealthier middle classes. The existence value is related to both the direct and indirect values, because without the

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forest neither would have any meaning, but it is more than just the sum of those two values since a world without forest would be a very different habitat for humans. Various attempts have been made to estimate the economic value of the ecosystem services provided by forest, but the majority use some form of Willingness to Pay and derive an average amount that each respondent is willing to pay, but they do not define the population from which the sample is taken, so cannot scale up the results to obtain either an estimate of the value of a particular area of forest, such as a National Park, or an estimate of the national or regional value attributed to all the forest, nationally or regionally. Kanari (2013) assesses the Willingness to Pay for the conservation of a National Park in Sarawak, and finds that international visitors are willing to pay the equivalent of US$1.92 in addition to the entrance fee in order to improve the conservation of the area. Local visitors are willing to pay about US$0.88. The sample size for each class of visitor is given, but not the total annual number or the seasonal variation so that it is not possible to estimate the overall value that visitors attribute to the Park. Garcia et  al. (2007) used a national telephone survey in France to estimate the value that residents attributed to the forest for biodiversity. The initial sample was 4504 households, but only 1999 were willing to take part in the survey and of those 743 were protest votes, which were excluded. The caller offered each respondent a

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given amount between 6 € and 90 €, selected at random for each call, and were asked if they were willing to pay the amount proposed for conservation of forests. The proportion of positive answers declined as the price increased, but even at the highest price about a third of respondents agreed. The overall average amount that respondents were willing to pay was 55  € per household. This is within the range found in other European countries that were reviewed during the study. However, none of the studies can be converted to a value per unit area for forest or to a national average value for all forests. A more comprehensive study was conducted in Uganda by Bush et al. (2004) which sampled regions of the country based on available population and household data, so that they were able to extrapolate their results to obtain regional and national estimates. The main survey was to examine the value to households of income from the forest and they found that nationally households derived 19% of their income from forests worth around US$194 per household annually. For the population at large the annual contribution to GDP was estimated at US$190 million. They then looked at the value of the nation’s forests for other ecosystem services and estimated the annual values to be: Soil conservation US$57.7 million; Watershed protection US$34.76 million; Carbon US$32.2million and Biodiversity US$3.3 million. These values together with the household income value amount to US$316 million annually or 5.2% of national GDP.  The biodiversity value was based on estimates of the potential income from exploiting the genetic resources for bio-chemicals and for a disease resistant wild coffee.

 orest Environmental Functions F and Values There are a large number of environmental factors where forests play a crucial role in mitigating the impact of extreme conditions. However, the role of forests and hence their value to mankind is very site specific, so that not all forests are equally

valuable, and their value can vary according to the environmental factor being considered. The principal environmental factors where forests may play a role are rainfall, wind, temperature and sunlight and forests can provide protection from extremes of these factors for humans and their crops, livestock and property, soils, the coastline and wild plants, animals and fish.

Rainfall and Floods The two aspects of rainfall that can cause problems are extreme intensity of rain over a short period of time resulting from an event such as a typhoon or hurricane, and prolonged heavy rain, usually associated with a stationary or slow moving frontal system. The former are events that usually occur during a particular season, and do not affect very large areas at any one time, so that any particular place may only experience such events once in 50 or 100  years. When they do occur they can cause flash flooding and do a lot of damage. Flash flooding can cause landslides, which too often kill people and damage property and infrastructure. Prolonged heavy rain has a different impact, because the enormous quantity of water generally spreads over a much wider area than is affected by the rainfall, and is therefore less destructive though no less disruptive and damaging. Recent examples are Pakistan in 2010, during which about 20% of the country was inundated and almost 2000 people were killed, and Thailand in 2011, when much of Bangkok and the surrounding densely populated region was under water for several months. These events were so extreme that forests could not have done much to mitigate the impact, but in both cases the rain fell in mountainous areas to the north of the heavily populated region, which had been heavily forested in the past, but are now much less so. Forests transpire much more water than crops and grassland, so at the start of a rainy season the soil is drier, which enables it to absorb more water. Trees also intercept rainfall in their foliage, which is then reevaporated into the atmosphere.

Forest Environmental Functions and Values

The role of forests in mitigating flooding is very controversial, in part due to the fact that experimental evidence from small catchments has been assumed to apply over large areas. Alila et al. (2009) question the validity of much of the work published on comparisons between paired catchments that have concluded that forest management practices such as harvesting may affect flooding after small to medium rainfall events, but not large events. The criticism is about comparing the impact of sequential rainfall events that may be quite different in character and be affected by changes in the catchment due to vegetation regrowth or erosion, rather than using rainfall events that have a similar frequency of occurrence, that is, a similar intensity and duration. Extrapolation from small catchments to large river basins does not take account of the fact that a heavy rainfall event may be localised over one or two sub-catchments, but that the effect is too small to have an impact on the larger river basin. In the southern Philippine Island of Mindanao, Deutsch et al. (1998) report on the results of community-based water quality monitoring over a 2 year period in four sub-catchments of the Manupali River with forest cover ranging from 46% in the most heavily forested catchment to 21% in the least forested. The monitoring was of the river flow, suspended sediments and bacterial contamination and clearly showed that the river flow was strongly influenced by the amount of forest cover, with the more densely forested sub-­ catchment showing lower peak flows after heavy rain and slightly higher flows between rainstorms. The results were consistent over the 2 years of monitoring. They also showed that the level of suspended solids in the water and the total load of suspended solids increased sharply in the two sub- catchments where forest cover was below 30%, while the bacterial contamination was highest in the more heavily populated and least forested sub-catchments, though population density was not greatly different. The involvement of the community in the monitoring had the effect of raising their awareness of the consequences of illconsidered land-use practices and indiscriminate clearance of forest. The Manupali River flows into

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the Pulangi River, which has been dammed for a large hydro-electric power station, and interviews with the station operators revealed that the reservoir is silting up at the rate of about 1 m per year and that the suspended solids cause excessive wear of the turbine blade that require the station to be shut down periodically. In Vietnam, Fraser and Jewell (2008) examined the impact of loss of forest cover on the hydrology of the Sesan and Srepok rivers that rise in the Central Highlands and flow into the Mekong River at Stung Treng in Cambodia. The headwaters of both rivers had been subject to widespread clearance of forest, primarily for the cultivation of coffee. Data on rainfall and river flow was obtained from the archives of the Mekong River Committee for the decade 1985–1995, during which time there was severe loss of forest cover in both river basins. Although the two rivers are in the same general region the rainfall pattern over the decade was different, with the Srepok having less rainfall overall and experiencing two particularly dry seasons in the middle of the period. This probably explains why the type of forest differs between the two river basins with the Sesan having mainly tropical evergreen forest throughout the basin, while the Srepok basin is mainly covered with dry deciduous forest. The Sesan River showed a higher runoff to rainfall ratio than the Srepok and they responded differently to two heavy rainfall events about a week apart that affected both rivers. The Sesan showed a clear peak flow after each event, while the Srepok responded more slowly to the first event and showed a gradual rise and fall over a longer period covering both rainfall events. The river basins had one thing in common and that was the difference in response to a heavy rainfall event at the beginning and the end of the season. The runoff to rainfall ratio was much lower in both basins at the start of the season, suggesting that the soils were much drier and therefore able to absorb more water before surface runoff commenced. Bradshaw et  al. (2007) using data from the Flood Observatory database for the period 1990– 2000 for 57 tropical developing countries in Asia, Africa and Central and South America found that

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flood frequency was negatively correlated with the amount of forest cover still remaining in the country, i.e. less forest cover is associated with a higher frequency of flooding. It showed the reverse for flooding intensity and the rate of forest loss, i.e. a higher rate of forest loss is associated with a higher flooding intensity. Forest cover together with rainfall, slope and amount of degraded land in the country accounted for 65% of the variation in flood frequency. Whiteman and Fraser (1997) reached a similar conclusion in part of a study to assess the value of forestry to the Indonesian economy, by the Indonesia–UK Tropical Forest Management Programme. The study included an analysis of 39 major river basins in 11 of the then 27 provinces for which data was available on the area subject to flooding, forest cover and river flow rates (mean daily discharge, mean maximum discharge and the overall maximum discharge). The latter were obtained from a World Bank Project and some limited data on the areas flooded and the damage caused was obtained from government sources. The result showed that area flooded per km2 of watershed protection forest ranged from 0.11 to 2.8  ha, with floods being proportionally less in the river basins with the largest areas of Watershed Protection forest. In Indonesia, forest is designated according to its function and forest on steep slopes is designated as Watershed Protection forest. A multiple regression analysis was carried out with the data on flooded area and various measures of the area of forest according to function within each river basin. The three most significant variables had R2 of 0.58, which is significant at 5% probability, and provides a means of estimating the change in area flooded that could be expected to result from a given change in proportion of forest cover. This regression shows that if the area of forest, and especially Watershed Protection forest decreases, the area flooded will increase as suggested by the correlation analysis and similar to the findings of Bradshaw referred to above: A = 3.54057 − ( 0.01547 × T % ) + ( 0.04977 × HL + % ) − ( 2.57552 × LOG HL + % )

where A  =  the area flooded per ha of (HL + HSA + HPT); HL+% = the percentage of the area of DAS covered by HL + HSA + HPP; HL%  =  the percentage of the area of the DAS covered with HL and T% = the percentage of the area of the DAS covered by forest (all classes) (DAS = river basin, HL = Watershed Protection forest, HSA  =  Nature Conservation forest, HPT  =  Limited Production forest, HPP = Production forest). The equation suggests that as the area of Watershed Protection forest decreases, the area flooded per ha of Watershed Protection forest rises, but the rate decreases exponentially as the area of Watershed Protection forest decreases. This is in line with what would be expected, in that a river basin with a relatively high proportion of Watershed Protection forest would experience a rapid increase in flooding as the forest area started to decline, but the rate of increase in flooding would decline as the forest area decreased further. The above regression suggests that reducing extensive forest cover down to about 55% has little effect on flooding, but as the proportion of forest falls below this value, flooding will increase, rapidly at first, but at a decreasing rate. For the 39 river systems in 11 provinces, the model suggests that the total average area flooded annually is around 618 Km2. The reported area of rice paddy flooded during the 3 years for which data was available at the time ranges between 426 and 918 Km2, which suggests that the model prediction is sufficiently close to allow it to be used for examining the effect of changes in land-­use on the extent of flooding. If, for example, the Watershed Protection forest cover is reduced by 1% the model predicts an annual area flooded of 651 km2, or an increase of about 5.2% and for a 2% reduction in Watershed Protection forest cover the annual area flooded is estimated at 683  km2. A 1% reduction in the Watershed Protection forest cover is about 100,000  ha so the value of the Watershed Protection forest could be related to the cost of the additional flooding that might result from its loss.

Forest Environmental Functions and Values

Some data on the then current levels and extent of flood damage were obtained and used to estimate the additional cost of flood damage to agriculture, infrastructure, housing and public buildings that could result from a reduction in the forest cover. The estimated cost of flood damage with the forest cover at the time was US$1038 million, so that a 100,000 ha reduction in the area of Watershed Protection forest that resulted in a 5.2% increase in the area flooded might be expected to cause an increase in damage costing around US$50 million annually, which gives a value of around US$500 per ha for the forest. However, not all the Watershed Protection forest will have such a value, and if the area flooded increases less rapidly as more forest is lost, the value of the remaining forest declines. The data on the then current levels of flooding suggest that fairly serious flooding takes place somewhere in the country every year, but it is unlikely to be in the same place each time so that it is difficult to attribute a particular flood and associated damage to the loss of a particular area of forest, but it seems clear that forests have some role to play in mitigating flood damage. Clearly forest in Indonesia will have different values from other countries, when valued this way, as the relationship between the forest cover and the areas flooded depends on topographic and climatic factors, and the cost of damage depends on the way in which the population uses the areas that are flood prone. In seeking to achieve sustainable forest management consideration must be given at the Management Unit level to the local importance of mitigating flood damage. The discussion above relates only to natural forest, where there is a mixture of tree sizes and species and dense undergrowth that protects the soil from large drops formed in the tree canopy as well as debris that obstructs surface water flow. When natural forest is disturbed, logged or converted to plantations the beneficial effects are greatly reduced and maybe lost all together. Consequently, afforestation for flood mitigation may only be effective if it is done in such a way as to create conditions similar to a natural forest stand with minimal disturbance to the soil and ground vegetation.

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Rainfall and Erosion The relationship between forests and soil erosion is less controversial than that with flooding, as there is strong evidence, discussed earlier in Chap. 8, that forests especially on steep slopes can greatly reduce the amount of soil lost. Soil erosion has three consequences: first there is a loss of nutrients from the soil where the erosion is occurring, second there is a deposition of the eroded soil downstream and third there is the possibility of a build-up of nutrient in the aquatic environment that can lead to eutrophication and disrupt fish stocks. The former reduces the productivity of the soil if the losses are greater than the rate at which they are replenished by inflows of nutrients from elsewhere. This can be from slow degradation of the bedrock as well as being water borne from higher land. Forests help both these processes by extracting nutrients from lower horizons of the soil and cycling them into the surface litter by their leaf fall and by slowing the rate of surface water flow and improving infiltration into the soil so that some of the nutrients are retained. The second consequence, of deposition downstream, can be both beneficial and costly, depending on the quantities involved and where the nutrients finish up. Modest amounts of eroded soil carrying nutrients are part of the natural cycle and benefit flat low-lying areas where they improve the fertility and hence the productivity for crop cultivation. Large amounts can silt up reservoirs and river channels and exacerbate flooding and when associated with a heavy rainfall event can also damage crops and even buildings and infrastructure. Landslides are an extreme example. In Table 8.1, the amount of soil lost through erosion increases between five and ten times, depending on the slope length, when the slope increases from less than 3% to more than 12% and all other things being equal. Forest cover is therefore particularly beneficial on slopes greater than about 15%. However, other things are rarely equal, so the amount of erosion that might be expected will vary from place to place according to the amount and intensity of the rainfall, the soil

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physical and chemical properties and the land-use. The loss of nutrients is closely linked to the amount of runoff and amount of sediment transported, but there are two mechanisms at work. The first is nutrients that are contained in the sediments themselves, and the second is the nutrients that are dissolved by the rainfall and get transported in solution. There is some evidence (Hidayat et  al. 2012) that the former is larger from under forest compared with crops, but overall nutrient losses are higher from bare land and crops. Rodrigues et al. (2009) working in an area with steep slopes in the Colombian Andes found that total nutrient losses from soils under crops with clean cultivation and coffee were from 10 to 20 times higher than from under Giant Bamboo and secondary forest. Potassium and Calcium were the two nutrients showing the highest losses. As with flooding, the benefits of forests in reducing soil and nutrient losses are very site specific, and also depend on the condition of the forests, so that it is not possible to put an economic value on the benefits for soil conservation by forests in general. In specific locations the value for soil conservation would be the costs associated with the siltation of watercourses and reservoirs and disruption to fish stocks that would result from losing the forest. There would be an opportunity cost from not clearing the forest, but that would have to take account of the value of the nutrients that would be lost due to erosion and the impact of that on the productivity of the replacement crop. Gulati and Rai (2014) working in sloping land in the Chota Nagpur Plateau area in India measured an annual loss of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium of 590 kg per ha, which they estimated would cost US$137 per ha to replace with artificial fertilisers. The magnitude of the nutrient losses depends to a large extent on the amount of nutrients that are in the soil naturally as well as the factors that determine the amount of erosion that is likely to occur. It is well known that the fallow period when secondary forest regrows after shifting cultivation restores the fertility of the soil and will nor-

mally occur naturally, unless the site has been so heavily degraded that it has been taken over by grasses or bamboo. Decisions regarding the role of forests in reducing the risk of soil erosion and nutrient loss and in restoring degraded land need to be taken at the local Management Unit level where all the factors that determine an outcome can be assessed.

Wind and Waves In some parts of the world wind erosion can be a serious problem and forests can mitigate it through providing shelter and stabilising the soil. In the north-east of Scotland at a place called Culbin, there are extensive sand dunes along the coast that have been subject to severe wind erosion. Prior to the seventeenth century the sand was more or less held in check by a cover of grasses, but local people were in the habit of harvesting the grasses for roof thatching and this allowed the wind to act on the sand. Eventually a small village was buried under the sand and the area was abandoned. In 1921, shortly after the Forestry Commission was established it acquired the land at Culbin and began a process of stabilising the sand, first by covering the sand with tree branches and then planting trees, mainly the native pine species. After 30 years the area had become a well growing and dense forest that has allowed the development of considerable biodiversity. In the low-lying areas between the dunes, salt marshes form and these have attracted many species of bird and insects. The public also enjoys the area for leisure and recreation among the trees and near the beach. There is no further movement of the sand and it is difficult to imagine that the area was once a desert. Mascarenhas and Jayakumar (2008) surveyed the damage along the coast of Tamil Nadu in India following the Tsunami of 2004 and report that forests of Casuarina equisetifolia and palm trees withstood the wave with only minor damage to trees nearest the sea, while man-made structures like sea walls were totally destroyed. Villages that were inland from forested areas

Forest Environmental Functions and Values

were fully protected from the wave, unlike villages on the shore or on dunes that were also totally destroyed. A total of about 8000 people were killed by the Tsunami. They record a total of 25 storm events along the coast of Tamil Nadu during the period from 1952 to 2004 that also caused extensive damage. Vanugopal et al. (2008) describe work along the same coast similar to that at Culbin to restore and stabilise the coastal sand dunes following the Tsunami. Similar benefits are reported by Spalding et al. (2014) for mangroves providing protection to the shoreline and human settlements and infrastructure from the impact of the Tsunami and other storm surges. The extensive mangrove forests in the Sundarbans and further east along the southern coast of Bangladesh provide protection from storm surges caused by cyclones in the Bay of Bengal as well as helping to create new land by trapping the silt being carried by the Brahmaputra river delta. To the west of the Sundarbans, the government is planting mangroves on new islands created from silt deposits, to extend the area where the coastline is protected. Wind can be troublesome inland as well as on the coast, and trees and forests can provide useful shelter both for human settlements and for livestock. However in areas where the soil is shallow trees are susceptible to being blown over by strong winds, and this can have a negative impact on the value of a forest for timber. Plantations can be established as shelterbelts, and depending on the species of trees that are planted and the width of the belt, can also provide some timber and promote biodiversity. Mention has been made earlier of the value of biodiversity corridors to connect fragmented areas of woodland, and these can also perform a useful function in providing shelter for crops and livestock.

Forest Carbon Forest carbon is an environmental service that can be given a financial value based on a market price, though the economic value based on either the future costs of climate change or the cost of alternative methods for reducing emissions of

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carbon dioxide is not yet possible. There are two ways in which forests can contribute to mitigating the impact of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: the first is by avoiding adding to the emissions of carbon dioxide and the second is by sequestering it through growth of trees. Any wood created by trees that remains as wood during the period of its use, such as timber incorporated into buildings in the form of structural components, joinery component or furniture, keeps the carbon locked up, so does not contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand wood that is burnt will make an immediate contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, while if it is allowed to rot the emissions will be spread over several years. Much of the forest that is lost each year is burnt to clear the land for some other use and these are avoidable emissions. Some of it is cleared for shifting cultivation, some is for cash crops and livestock and some is for mining and infrastructure. Improving agricultural productivity would reduce the need to clear more land for crops, but this is something that is not under the control of foresters except if concessions are granted in forest areas knowing that the forest will be cleared. In such circumstances an environmental impact assessment should be carried out to determine if the proposed method for dealing with the trees and the alternative use of the land is the most efficient, taking account of the carbon dioxide emissions that will result and the carbon sequestration that will be foregone. It should also take account of the other environmental services that are being provided by the forest, discussed above, to ensure that the benefits from the alternative use of the land exceed the costs of losing the forest. It would help to alert those who want to clear forests to some of the environmental consequences of their plans if they had to assess the carbon stock on the land they propose to clear and had to pay for it at the prevailing market price of carbon. Having to pay around US$1000–2000 per ha might make them think twice about the amount of forest that they really need to clear. This process should be carried out in consultation with all the stakeholders that will be affected by the outcome, including those wishing to clear

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forest, local communities, the forest authority and users of water downstream. A Spatial Multiple-Criteria Analysis is a useful tool for carrying out such an exercise. All the stakeholders should identify criteria that they consider important, and then using a matrix, each criteria is ranked against each of the others in order to determine the overall ranking. A Geographical Information System can be used to delineate the areas that meet the criteria in a hierarchy determined by the ranking. Thus areas that should remain as forest because they are providing important ecological, environmental or social services may be ranked highly and will be delineated first and the area best suited to the proposed alternative land-use will be directed onto areas where the forest services are less important. If these areas are unsuitable for the particular alternative land-use, for whatever reason, then either the change in land-use is rejected or it may be possible to reach a compromise by allowing the conversion of some of the forest where the benefits are marginal. One of the criteria for the alternative land-use should be its sustainability and productivity, to avoid clearing more forest than necessary. There is much debate about the use of biomass (including wood) as a fuel on the basis of its being a renewable resource and so carbon neutral. If the wood is just harvested and burnt, then it is clearly not carbon neutral and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and to climate change. However, the act of burning the wood is merely putting back into the atmosphere the carbon that the trees sequestered over their lifetime. If the trees that have been harvested for biomass are replaced in the same area with trees that will grow as fast or faster than those that have been harvested, then the carbon emitted by the burning will be re-sequestered. It therefore seems that biomass fuel should be accompanied by a third party awarded certificate to guarantee that there is a replacement crop that will sequester all the carbon emitted from its combustion. This should be feasible for medium to large-scale users of biomass fuels and would ensure that biomass plantations are managed sustainably.

 ocial Functions and Values S of Forest and Ecotourism The ecological and environmental services discussed above provide indirect benefits for humans in the form of clean water or less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while social services have a direct benefit enjoyed by individuals, families and groups of people. Some of these services are paid for and thus generate income for the forest owner or management, which creates a financial value for the forest, while others are aesthetic and are enjoyed but not paid for, so represent an additional intangible economic value. Recreational activities and ecotourism are examples of the first group of benefits and the enjoyment of seeing forests in the landscape and camping in a forest environment are examples of the latter. In 2012 the United Nations passed Resolution 66/288 “The future we want” A well designed and well managed tourism (sector) can make a significant contribution to the three dimensions of sustainable development and has close linkages to other sectors and can create decent jobs and generate trade opportunities

Some countries have developed forest-based ecotourism to a high degree with towers, boardwalks and even cable cars to facilitate access by tourists to all parts of a forest, including the tree canopy. Where such facilities have been developed they are usually complemented by accommodation, eating facilities, toilets and even attractions for children such as slides and cable chutes. These can generate substantial income for the forest and make a positive contribution to its management. Such facilities can generate many jobs for guides, construction and maintenance workers, and service providers such as accommodation and food that can be very important to the local economy, especially in rural areas. However, there is a downside in that the numbers of tourists visiting such facilities is generally growing and in some cases has reached such numbers that they are becoming overcrowded and it is having a negative impact on the surrounding environment. Not everyone likes the highly organised experience provided by such facilities and in other

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countries and other places the emphasis is more on individual personal experience such as hiking to a natural attraction such as a waterfall or lake or into a wilderness area to observe wildlife, especially birds. These sorts of activities for individuals or small groups of 2 or 3 persons generate less income, but also do less damage to the environment. There is a trade-off that needs to be carefully balanced if sustainability is to be achieved. Ecotourism is advocated as a means of supporting and financing conservation, though it is not developed exclusively for Conservation of Protected areas. Balmford et  al. (2015) have estimated that the number of visitors worldwide to Protected Areas is around 8 billion visits, generating US$600 billion in in-country expenditure and US$ 250 billion in consumer surplus, but most of the visits and expenditure were in Europe and North America. Their estimate was based on data from 551 Protected Areas in 51 countries, which they extrapolated using regional models, to estimate the total for the 94,248 Protected Areas worldwide listed in the Protected Area Database. Of their sample data, there were 256 sites in Europe and North America and the total number of visits in each region in 2007 was around 75 million or an average of about 600,000 visits to each site or about 1600 per site every day. This figure doesn’t mean anything other than to give an idea of the popularity of such visits in developed countries and the level of risk of overcrowding. Mutrimah et al. (2015) studied the impact of ecotourism on income generation and poverty reduction in a National Park in Malaysia and found that villages associated with the park and involved in ecotourism activities had higher income than average for rural villages in the country and that households derived an average of 47% of their income from ecotourism activities such as acting as guides and providers of other services and trading with the tourists. Snyman (2014) conducted similar studies in six countries in Southern Africa and found that employment in Ecotourism was a crucial source of income for villagers living in or near to areas where ecotourism was being implemented with average

monthly income of those employed in ecotourism being more than double the income of those not involved in the business. In addition to the cash income, those involved in ecotourism also benefited from new skills learnt and the opportunity afforded by the additional income to ensure better education for their children and to diversify their economic activities. In Lao PDR, Eshro et al. (2018) undertook a trial with a system of direct payments to local communities to test the concept as a strategy for reducing illegal hunting in a National Park. The concept was negotiated with nine village communities living in the buffer zone of the park, whereby they would operate night safaris along a river in the Totally Protected Zone and each village would receive financial payments into a Village Development Fund dependent on the number of visiting tourists taking the safaris. All villagers would share the proceeds of the fund. In addition to the basic contribution to the fund there would be a bonus for every sighting of various species of wild animals by the tourists and a deduction for every infraction of the ban on hunting in the Totally Protected Zone. Some villagers would be employed as guides and receive an income. The results after 4 years are very encouraging as the number of tourists and sightings of wildlife increased and the number of illegal hunting infractions declined to zero in the Totally Protected Zone, although the authors express some caution about the direct link between the reduced hunting and the increased sightings of wild animals. The latter may not represent an increase in numbers but may be due to fewer disturbances by hunters and greater familiarity with passing tourists. Narayan (1998) examines the impact that ecotourism has had in Costa Rica and finds that the lack of regulation has resulted in some unscrupulous operators causing damage to the environment and acting irresponsibly towards tourists. He recommends that when ecotourism is to be developed, there should be some kind of licensing or certification scheme so that only properly trained and equipped operators are allowed to offer ecotourism services.

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12  Valuation of Forest Ecosystem, Environmental and Social Services

Ecotourism is therefore not just a source of income for the forest, but is also a means of providing an incentive to local communities to conserve and protect their forests. Drumm et  al. (2004) have produced a Manual on the Business of Ecotourism Development and Management that can help managers of conservation areas around the world to achieve the best possible outcome. Forests represent different things to different people. Indigenous peoples that live in or beside forests see the forest as a sacred place for the spirits of their ancestors, while in developed countries some people love to see forest in the landscape, while others prefer wide open spaces with broad vistas unencumbered with trees, and still others have little interest in the countryside. Assuming that the cost of air travel remains relatively low, and that incomes continue to rise in many developing countries, the desire for ecotourism is likely to grow. The increasing number of excellent documentaries about nature and wildlife being shown on television around the world is raising public awareness of the natural world and is stimulating interest in “seeing for oneself”. In many ways this is to be welcomed, as it will help to raise awareness of the consequences of further destruction of natural forest and bring pressure to bear on politicians to do something about it. However, if it results in increased pressure on the existing ecotourism “hot spots” it could have negative consequences for their sustainability. The impact of the existing and new ecotourism facilities needs to be carefully planned and monitored to ensure that their sustainability is not being threatened by overexploitation and perhaps in some situations limits on the number of people visiting sites at any one time need to be established. Management plans for Forest Management Units should consider whether any scope exists for developing ecotourism or recreational facilities within the unit. If it is considered appropriate to develop facilities for public access, then measures need to be considered and adopted for visitor management.

Improving access to protected areas, especially in developing countries, to promote ecotourism can have perverse consequences by facilitating access for illegal hunters and migrant farmers looking for land. One option that is available for remote areas with ecotourism potential, such as the Kayan-Mentarang National Park in North-­east Kalimantan on the Indonesian part of the Island of Borneo, is to use airships. These can add to the interest for eco-tourists and reduce the travel time to get to remote areas as well as providing excellent aerial views of the forest and vegetation. They are also useful for the managers of the protected area for carrying out patrolling to check for illegal activities. In Kayan-Mentarang there are serious problems with illegal loggers coming over the border from the Malaysian State of Sabah. Their incursions can be seen on satellite images, but it is difficult to apprehend them because of the remoteness and difficult access. Apart from conveying eco-tourists and patrolling, airships can also transport supplies for management staff, making living in remote areas more civilised and in the case of Kayan-­ Mentarang can also be used to transport a range of produce from local communities to market. Difficult access to markets is one of the reasons why many remote forest dwelling communities remain poor. Jurowski (2010) describes a Nature and Ecosystem Experience Classification Schema (NEECS) that facilitates both the planning and management of sites, by focusing on a combination of what the site is offering by way of experience of nature, learning opportunities and the physical characteristics of the site and the type of tourists that it is aiming at. The schema provides a set of quantitative indicators that can help both with marketing the site to give potential visitors an idea of what to expect and in monitoring the effectiveness of the site in achieving its objectives. The importance of monitoring is stressed by a number of authors, both to ensure that the environment and ecosystems are not being compromised by the visits and to ensure that visitors are having a worthwhile experience.

Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration

Forest management in the fullest sense of the word cannot begin until the forest to be managed has been clearly defined. Sustainable forest management further requires that the forest being managed will remain permanently as forest and will not be converted to some other land-use. In most developed countries forest areas are organised into forest management units that have clearly defined boundaries and some form of legal recognition. In most developing countries this is not the case and it is usually just certain Protected Areas that are gazetted and delineated on the ground in some way.

Establishment of Forest Management Units The first step in implementing sustainable forest management is to delineate a Permanent Forest Estate. This may be in broad terms at the national level for publically owned forests or at the individual property level for privately owned forest. There is no hard and fast rule as to how much forest a country should have but it should be based on a rational assessment of the future needs of the country in terms of the quality of the environment, the conservation of its natural heritage, its likely future needs for timber and other forest products and the need for land primarily for agriculture, but also for infrastructure, mining, housing and industry.

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Decisions will have to be made on such matters as whether land is better used for growing commodity crops for export or retaining forest for future generations. This may require limiting agricultural land to the area needed to feed the population, taking account of the expected growth in numbers and wealth and the scope for increasing agricultural productivity. This process should be conducted in consultation with stakeholders, which should include representatives from regional and local institutions, the agriculture, forestry, fishery and other sectors with interests in land-use. There are many ways to approach the matter of defining a Permanent Forest Estate. Brazil and Cameroon, as mentioned earlier (Chap. 2), enacted a Forest Code that empowered the government to delineate a Permanent Forest Estate and Indonesia enacted the Basic Forestry Law that gave the Forestry Department (later the Ministry of Forestry) jurisdiction over all forest land. These examples were very top-down and the national forest authorities delineated on relatively small-scale maps the areas that they regarded as being permanent forest, with little consultation with stakeholders. An example of a more participatory approach is the Forest and Timber Inquiry in Australia. The inquiry conducted by the Resource Assessment Commission looked at the Forest and undertook widespread public consultation as well as detailed discussions with stakeholders, including

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i­ndigenous people, environmental activists, the timber industry and groups involved in using the forest resources for various purposes such as recreation and leisure. It also reviewed research findings and relevant literature and commissioned some independent research studies. The purpose of the inquiry was not specifically to define a Permanent Forest Estate, but a major concern was the future of the remaining natural forests, which conservation groups wanted to see protected from further loss. The draft report published in 1991 included an analysis of five scenarios that reflected the views and opinions of the major stakeholder groups, which were: • No further logging of native forests, • The Australian Conservation Foundation alternative strategy, • Business as usual, • The Forestry and Forest Products Industry Council growth plan, and • Maximum wood production. The Final Report was produced in 1992, and recommended that the existing area of native (natural indigenous) forest should be established as permanent forest and that in order to reduce pressure to log that forest there should be an expansion of new plantations to be developed by the private sector. This resulted in the publication of a new National Forest Policy for Australia, which included: Conservation: To maintain an extensive and permanent native forest estate and to manage it in an ecologically sustainable manner for the full range of forest values. Timber production: To develop internationally competitive forest-based industries that maximises value-adding opportunities within Australia. Integrated and coordinated decision-making: To streamline land-use decisions and reduce state-commonwealth conflicts. Private native forests: To encourage the retention and better management of private native for-

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ests, both for resource and conservation reasons. Plantations: To expand commercial plantation development on cleared private land, both to provide additional timber resources and to help address land degradation problems on farmland. Water production: To ensure the protection of water catchment values. Tourism: To give greater recognition to the value of forests for tourism and to ensure that this use does not lead to a decline in these values. Employment: To expand employment opportunities and the skill base of people working in forest management and forest-based industries. Public awareness: To foster community understanding of sustainable forest management and their participation in decision-making. Research: To increase Australia’s forest research effort and to ensure that it is well-coordinated and directed to appropriate goals. International responsibilities: To promote nature conservation and sustainable use of forests outside Australia and to ensure that Australia fulfils its obligations under international agreements. The new policy in order to meet the first policy objective of maintaining an extensive permanent estate of native forest put much emphasis on the role of the private sector and in particular the creation of large areas of new plantations to meet future timber requirements and reduce pressure on the native forests. One instrument used to implement this part of the policy was a special tax arrangement that allowed plantation owners to deduct specific establishment costs from their tax liability. The development of scenarios is a useful method for examining the trade-offs between alternative courses of action and it helps opposing viewpoints on priorities to better understand the reasoning behind the opposition’s position. It will not be possible to please everybody, but if a compromise can be reached that satisfies the majority, progress can be made.

Establishment of Forest Management Units

Having defined a Permanent Forest Estate in broad terms it is necessary to divide it into Forest Management Units. For Natural forest areas this is best done with local knowledge and may be delegated to local or regional branches of the forest authority who should be aware of existing local communities that are living within or adjacent to areas identified at the national level. As far as possible, the boundaries of Forest Management Units should follow natural boundaries such as rivers and ridges between river basins (watersheds) or clearly defined man-made boundaries such as roads or registered property boundaries. It is an expensive business surveying and marking boundaries in the field and much money has been wasted in developing countries in marking boundaries that have subsequently been ignored by either land speculators or local communities. One of the main reasons that boundaries are ignored is lack of consultation with local communities and the adoption of a top-­down approach to delineating Forest Management Units. The example of the Tapajos National Forest cited in Chap. 3 demonstrates the problem that exists in many countries as well as indicating a possible solution. The National Forest was originally decided and delineated at the national level with no regard for communities already settled in the area. It took more than 25 years to resolve the conflict caused by the government’s attempts to evict the people from the forest, which ultimately failed. The cost of the delay and the time spent by government officials in discussing and negotiating must be very significant, and had it taken place at the start the communities could have been generating much needed income for all that time. Forest Management Units will also include plantation areas and do not necessarily have to be a single large block of forest. While it may be slightly more efficient to manage a single large block, provided there is reasonable access for the managers and staff, there is no reason why it can’t be either a large block with some smaller out-lying blocks or several medium sized blocks within an accessible radius of the each other. It is a little more costly per unit area to delineate boundaries and manage small blocks compared with large ones, but if it facilitates agreement

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with local communities on the importance of respecting the forest boundary it is worth it. Where a community already occupies land within an area of forest that has been designated as a Forest Management Unit, then creating an enclave within the forest is probably the best way to deal with the matter. There is no ideal size for a Forest Management Unit as it depends on a combination of the conditions of the forest (e.g. forest type and composition, degree of fragmentation, topography and accessibility) and the objectives of management. For plantations it will depend on the owner or promoter and the amount of land that is available or has been acquired. If the primary objective of management is for timber production, then the size of the unit should in some way be related to the sustainable level of harvest, after allowing for areas within the unit that may be set aside for biodiversity conservation or soil protection purposes. There are considerable overheads for forest management in terms of an office, staff, transport, upkeep of access, inventory and monitoring, fire protection, etc. that need to be spread over a large enough area to keep the cost per unit area as low as possible. The unit size also needs to take account of the likely use of the produce. If the main market is to relatively small local sawmills, then a unit need not be too big or may consist of several blocks spread over a wide area. On the other hand if the main user of the produce harvested is a large sawmill or plywood mill or an integrated wood processing facility, then a unit can be quite large. Temperate coniferous forests are generally much more productive than most mixed tropical forests, so forest management units in the latter are likely to be larger than in the former. When the primary objective of management is either biodiversity or soil protection the size of a unit is determined more by the conservation or protection requirements. If an area of forest is the habitat for large mammals, then a large area is required and in hilly or mountainous areas it is the extent of the steeply sloping land that determines the area that needs protection. If a forest area has already been allocated as a concession to a company for logging it may be appropriate to convert the concession to a Forest

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Management Unit. Much depends on the size of the concession and how it was delineated in the first place. If it has been done more or less in line with the criteria discussed above on size, boundaries and in consultation with local communities, then it should be fairly straightforward. On the other hand, if it has been delineated on a small-­ scale map at the national level with little consideration for the situation on the ground and no consultation with local communities, it will be necessary to make adjustments to meet the criteria. In Indonesia, the Indonesia–UK Tropical Forest Management Project assisted the government to establish five pilot forest management units (called Kesatuan Pengelolaan Hutan Produksi, KPHP) in three provinces. Three of the units were based on a single concession, one was based on two concessions and one on four concessions. All the concessions had been in operation for more than ten years. One was in swamp forest and two were in fairly remote areas and two were very accessible. The following discussion is based on the experience gained from the activities conducted over the period from 1992 to 1999 to establish these units.

Management Tasks Boundary Marking Once an area of forest has been designated as a Forest Management Unit it is essential to review the external boundaries to deal with any conflict or overlap with local communities or existing registered properties. Maps, aerial photographs or satellite images at an appropriate scale depending on the size of the unit and the topography are essential. Reasonably recent aerial photographs or high resolution satellite imagery will show where the proposed boundary is inappropriate and can be used with a community mapping exercise to revise the boundary to eliminate areas that are already in use by the community. The boundary should be traversed on the ground by staff from the Forest Management Unit accompanied by representatives of the com-

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munity to check that the interpretation of the maps or images is correct and up to date and after making any adjustments that are necessary, agree with the community representatives that it is acceptable and that they will not encroach on the forest area. The marking of the forest boundary is done in a variety of ways, with some countries using wooden posts and others stone or concrete markers (see Plate 13.1). The markers may be labelled with the bearing and distance to the next marker in either direction and should be spaced within line of sight. The current (2018) costs for boundary survey and marking are between US$ 500 and 800 per kilometre, depending on the terrain and the size of the markers used, which works out at from about US$ 10 per ha for a large block of 150,000  ha to as much as US$ 50 for a small block of 2000–3000 ha. This is the reason why it is important to be absolutely sure that the boundary is agreed and definitive before marking it. If there is subsequently encroachment into the forest, then much of the expenditure on marking the boundary is wasted. It is necessary to have a good topographic map at a scale of 1:10,000 for small Forest Management Units and 1:20,000 for larger units. Very large units may need several sheets to cover the whole area. The external boundary should be surveyed with a Global Positioning System and the information transferred to the map. Once the external boundary is settled it is necessary to establish internal boundaries to create compartments. These are needed to provide an identity reference for each part of the forest, to facilitate organisation of work and maintain records. As with the external boundaries, natural features should be used as far as possible and it is useful to have one boundary of each compartment on a road or access track. There is no specific size for compartments, which depends to a large extent on the size of the Management Unit, the composition of the forest and the topography. A compartment should be as homogenous as possible so that silvicultural work can be specified in reasonable detail and the area may vary between about 10 ha and 100 ha. In forests that are managed for timber production, the size depends to

Management Tasks

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Plate 13.1 Concrete boundary markers used in Cambodia

some extent on the productivity of the forest. In dense temperate conifer stands that are clear felled a 20 ha compartment would yield around 8000 m3 of logs. In a tropical rain forest that is selectively logged a compartment of 150  ha would yield about a half of that.

Forest Inventory A Forest Management Unit must be completely inventoried, and not just the current working area, as it is necessary to have information on the whole growing stock of timber and other resources such as carbon, non-timber forest products and wildlife and the existence of High Conservation Value (HCV) areas within the unit. To this end, aerial photographs or high resolution satellite imagery should be used to plan the inventory and stratify the forest according to the forest type and other characteristics such as crown canopy closure, average crown diameter and crown height. Stratification of the forest can improve the precision of an inventory by reducing the variability within strata. This reduces the number of sample plots required and can help to reduce the costs. The use of a Geographic Information System (GIS), if contour data are available, enables the

creation of a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) that can be used to delineate areas of steep slopes that should come under High Conservation Value Class 4 and need to be conserved for soil and water conservation. It may also be possible to identify areas with High Conservation Value Classes 1 and 3 that contain high levels of biodiversity or that provide a habitat for important endemic species. Participation of local communities in the planning stage of an inventory may help with these and will also enable any areas with High Conservation Value Class 5 (Community values) and 6 (Cultural values) to be identified. The High Conservation Value Resource Network has produced Guidelines for the Identification of HCVs (Brown et al. 2013). The biodiversity survey as described in Chap. 7 will establish a baseline for future monitoring of any changes in the biodiversity. Similarly the inventory of the timber, carbon and non-timber forest product resources will provide a baseline for monitoring changes in the future as well as providing the basis for planning the future management of the area. Where inventories are conducted in concession areas that have already been logged, the sampling should include areas that have been logged and record the year when the logging took place. This will enable the rate of recovery after

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logging to be assessed and will also reveal changes in the composition and structure of the forest that have resulted from the logging. Ferhmann et  al. (2017) describe the minimum standard of forest inventory for a Forest Management Unit in Indonesia (Kesatuan Pengelolaan Hutan, KPH). They recommend that inventory plots should be established on a grid pattern that corresponds with the National Forest Inventory, which uses a 20 km × 20 km grid for it plots. Thus the Forest Management Unit plots should be on a grid of either 5  km  ×  5  km, 10  km  ×  10  km or 20  km  ×  20  km to match exactly with the NFI grid. The plots should be established as Permanent Sample Plots, marked clearly on the ground and their location fixed with GPS and recorded so that they can be remeasured at regular intervals. There are a number of ways to keep the costs of inventory down as much as possible. ANRICA (2015) describes a system that uses a two-stage process with airborne photography and LIDAR from a light aircraft as the first stage to make a preliminary survey of the forest followed by ground sampling. The analysis of the data from the aerial survey enables the forest to be stratified into more homogenous areas for sampling and hence the number of ground sample plots to be reduced compared with a ground survey only while maintaining the same precision. The estimated cost of a pilot survey using this technique in Suriname was about US$ 14 per km2. The most common and efficient design for forest inventories uses systematic sampling along transects through the forest. The distance between transects and the spacing of the sample plots along each transect is determined by the sampling intensity required to achieve the desired level of precision. The distance between the transects and the distance between plots in the transect can be adjusted to match with a national forest inventory grid as recommended by Ferhmann above, if such a grid exists, but not all national forest inventories use such an arrangement. However, any plots established by a National Forest Inventory that lie within a forest management unit should be located and their position recorded.

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Bōttcher et al. (2009) review the costs of various alternative methods for inventorying forests in the context of monitoring carbon stocks for REDD+. They quote a number of sources of information that show costs ranging from US$ 0.02 per km2 for LANDSAT 5 TM, for which the imagery is free, but needs processing, through US$ 25 per km2 for very high resolution satellite imagery to US$ 350–550 per km2 for airborne RADAR and LIDAR. All these remote sensing techniques need to be complemented by ground survey plots, which can cost in the range US$ 100–200 per km2. The final cost of the inventory depends much on the precision required, but will also be influenced by the conditions in the forest, the topography and the climate. These costs mean that for a Forest Management Unit in tropical forest that is likely to be around 100,000 ha the cost of an inventory can range from US$ 1 million to US$ 2 million and even up to US$ 5 million if airborne RADAR or LIDAR is used. In order to monitor the growth of the forest over time, including timber and carbon stocks as well as non-timber forest products a series of Permanent Sample Plots throughout the forest is necessary. These should sample the same strata that have been identified for the initial inventory and need to be well marked both on the ground and on maps so that they can be easily found for periodic re-measurement. The number of plots will depend on the precision required and the homogeneity of the forest. The plots should be subject to the same treatment as the compartment in which they are located in order to monitor the impact of silvicultural operations. Care needs to be exercised in interpreting the results of the successive measurements to ensure that they are giving a true picture of the condition of the forest. Stagnant or negative growth between measurements could mean either that there is a problem such as disease, storm damage or drought or that the growing stock is overmature and its growth is slowing due to old age. The response would be different according to the cause. If the Annual Allowable Cut has been set too low, it may be resulting in too many mature or overmature trees that are hardly growing, so that the

Management Tasks

response could be to harvest more of the older trees to allow younger ones to develop. If there is disease or trees have been blown over by the wind it may be necessary to reduce the harvest level for a few years to compensate. The former situation occurred in Greece, because of over cautiousness in setting the Allowable Annual Cut.

Forest Management Planning Management is concerned with achieving desired aims as efficiently as possible and this requires careful planning, which entails: • Deciding on the appropriate Objectives of Management; • Collecting all the available information on which to base decisions about the best method of carrying out the work; • Assembling and organising the necessary resources; • Identifying all the activities that will be necessary to achieve the management objectives; • Implementing the necessary activities; • Exercising sufficient control over progress of the activities to achieve the set aims with the resources available; and • Monitoring the activities and the “environment” within which it is operating sufficiently frequently to ensure that the aims and methods used remain appropriate. This is where flexibility is required to ensure that the activities are adapted as conditions change. In addition to these tasks, “good management” is usually agreed to be that which runs smoothly and can afford to pay attention to high standards of workmanship and maintenance. From this summary of the tasks involved in management it is obvious that there is a considerable overlap between planning and management. Sustainable forest management requires financial and human resources that are usually in short supply and it is likely to be in competition with other economic activities for them. It is therefore important that the forest management should be

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at least as well or better managed than competing projects so that: • The maximum possible can be achieved with the available resources and • The forest being managed is in a position to maintain or increase its share of the total resources available if justified on other grounds, by using the resources at least as efficiently as the alternatives. Management is essentially an on-going activity, commencing with the decision to create a Forest Management Unit and continuing as long as there is some activity. As time passes many factors will change. Economic and social conditions will change, new technologies will be introduced, which will not only affect the methods that can be used in growing the trees, but will also affect the uses to which the products are put. Two important factors of sustainable forest management are therefore: • Continuity—To accommodate changes in resources, including personnel during the life of a project. • Flexibility—To adapt to changes in the conditions under which the project must operate. The most effective way to fulfil these requirements is to have a written Management Plan, which is regularly revised to accommodate changes. All the basic information that is essential to good management can be embodied in such a plan, and by having a section dealing with the programme of activities, which is regularly revised, flexibility can be built in. Such plans provide a permanent record of everything that has gone on over the life of the project and therefore give continuity when staff changes take place. Additional benefits which may accrue as a result of preparing formal Management Plans are: • Ensuring that National or the owner’s policy is implemented at the forest unit level. • Ensuring that the objectives are clearly defined and that the methods chosen for achieving

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them are realistic and have been fully evaluated. • Ensuring orderly development by relating activities to each other and to the needs of the forest as a whole.

Management Plans The format for Management Plans varies very much but the most important contents can be divided into the following main elements: Description: Basic data about the management unit on which subsequent decisions are based. This is a very important part of the plan, as it represents a baseline of the situation at the beginning of the plan period that can be used to assess the impact of management interventions over time in order to assess whether or not sustainability is being achieved. It will also include details of the inventory and biodiversity surveys as well as information on the soil conditions and any climatic and hydrological records that are available. These will be useful for assessing possible changes in the local climate and river and stream flow over time. Objects of Management: National and local objectives and their priorities. Evaluation of Alternatives: Identification of the alternative that best meets the objectives. Prescriptions: Definition of the methods to be used, and why and how the work will be organised. Input Forecasts and Budgets: Anticipation for a period of years ahead of the amount of work to be done each year, and hence the need for human and financial resources. Output Forecasts: Assessment of expected outputs of different products and services at various times in the future. Programme: Set out in detail the work needed in the next year, and where and when it will take place. Monitoring: To check actual progress against planned progress in order to take action to eliminate discrepancies if possible and adjust

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the next programme and future forecasts to the new situation. Maps: Relate the written material to the ground. For convenience these elements of a Management Plan can be grouped together to form two or three separate parts of the plan. Generally the Descriptive Section is placed in the first part on its own, since it is a distinct element and does not need frequent revising. The Objects of Management, and Evaluation of Alternatives, may justify a part of their own, depending on how much emphasis is placed on selecting and evaluating alternatives. Usually there are multiple Objectives of Management and there will be trade-offs between them that need to be assessed and evaluated to determine the appropriate balance between them. Alternatives may, for example, be between timber harvesting, carbon sequestration, recreation and ecotourism. Forecasts of the likely future revenue streams from each of these possible uses need to be compared with the direct costs for implementing each of them together with the opportunity cost of not fully implementing all or some of the others. The outcome will depend on the time-frame used and to some extent the discount rate used in calculating the Net Present Value of each of the alternatives. Forests that are Protected Areas for biodiversity conservation will need a management plan, but it will deal with measures for ensuring that the area is protected from illegal activities such as hunting and logging, with regular patrols, for example, and should prescribe whether any silvicultural treatments are to be applied, and if so when, where and how. It may be decided that everything should be left strictly to nature with no interventions. However, periodic surveys of the biodiversity status will be needed and the plan should provide guidance on how to deal with various possible observations such as a sudden decline in the population of an important species. The Prescriptions Section will deal with such matters as how to treat the HCV areas and whether access to them will be restricted and if so how. It will also prescribe where, how and when

Management Tasks

any harvesting of timber of non-timber products will be allowed. If there is to be public access for recreation purposes the means of controlling, monitoring and charging need to be set out. As time passes, decisions will continually have to be taken on the best methods to be used and the best treatments to be applied, as new research results become available. Decisions on such matters as the level of restocking after logging may be deferred until the amount and quality of natural regeneration can be determined. Before such decisions are made, the consequences of each possible option should be evaluated to ensure that the final choice is the best one. The Prescriptions, Forecasts, Programme and Control elements part of the plan are generally most conveniently placed in one part, since they deal with the actual work of the project and need to be systematically revised from time to time. They will use the compartment as the basis for allocating activities and resources. The advantages of having three parts is that the “objects of management” and “evaluation of alternatives”, which are essentially dealing with policy, only need occasional revision to reflect changes in national policy and in technology. The Forecasts and Programme need frequent revision, and it is therefore convenient to be able to detach them from the rest of the plan. More copies of these elements are needed in order to provide all the staff involved in day-to-day management with copies, and they need to be referred to continuously. Protection of the forest is an essential part of sustainable forest management and the Management Plan must deal with all the possible threats. These include human encroachment, fire, diseases and climatic factors, especially from climate change. If the boundaries have been surveyed in a participatory manner with neighbours and are marked well with signboard at intervals along the boundary, the risk of encroachment should be reduced, but periodic patrols will still be necessary to ensure that all is well. Good relations with the neighbours also help and they can be asked to report any evidence that they may find. Where agriculture land is scarce and population pressure is high the risk of encroachment

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into the forest is also high. Under these circumstances it can be very difficult to successfully protect the forest, unless many guards are deployed. It is therefore generally better to recognise that severe human encroachment on the forest is probably the result of some other driver, such as a concession being awarded to a company for a commodity crop plantation on land that had been farmed by the local community, probably without a title to the land. Experience in several countries suggests that a positive attitude towards the problem and a willingness to recognise its existence and to try to do something about it achieves better results than trying to oppose by force. Lobbying with the government to desist from giving concessions in the area and supporting the issuing of land titles to local farmers may help as it provides work to some of the local population. Fire protection is generally very important and there should be a specific plan giving details of the location of all observation points, rendezvous points for fire-fighting teams, equipment, access routes, control measures, measurement of fire hazard designation of stand-by measures, communications and responsibilities in the event of fire. The location of signs to warn the public of the fire hazard, and special arrangements with public fire-fighting teams should be laid down, when appropriate. The risk of fires is generally considerable in forest plantations and especially in the drier and hotter parts of the world. However, even the wetter regions of the world have dry spells when the vegetation can dry out quickly and fires spread rapidly once started. Thus all forest plantation forests should review very carefully the risks of fire and take appropriate protective measures. In natural forests, the condition of the edge is important to prevent fires entering the forest from neighbouring properties. (a) The causes of fire are generally due to man’s activities, though in some areas lightning or spontaneous ignition under very hot dry conditions may occur. Damaging fires may originate inside or outside the forest, from deliberate burning by farmers and graziers,

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from uncontrolled burning such as improperly extinguished camp-fires or deliberate arson, from motor vehicles or from fires started by project staff, which are not properly supervised. (b) Preventative measures should be aimed at eliminating fires at their origin or before they can build up enough to damage the tree crops. The measures that can be applied include bulldozed fire-breaks around the outside of the forest and along roads inside the forest. This will help to prevent fires entering the forest or becoming established at the most common places. Belts of fire-resistant trees can be planted at intervals to reduce the spread of fires and lower branches and dead vegetation can be removed from under young stands in susceptible places—particularly where there is public access, and around villages, paths, roads, etc. Warning noticeboards can be displayed and use should be made of the public radio service to broadcast fire warnings at dangerous periods. (c) Protective measures may be necessary when the preventative measures cannot be relied on fully. This includes ground patrols, fire towers for observation, possibly air patrols and in some situations the installation of a radio communication network between supervisors’ vehicles, observations towers, offices and labour camps is justified in order to speed mobilisation of fire-fighting teams. If a management unit has the use of a drone (as mentioned earlier in relation to illegal logging) it can also be used for monitoring for fires. Water reservoirs may need to be constructed at strategic places within the forest, and fire-fighting equipment and implements should be stored at the ready, and regularly serviced. When the risk of fire is persistent, it is advisable to have a fire plan as an appendix to the Management Plan. This will divide the forest into blocks for protective purposes, assign staff and equipment and observation facilities to each block, draw up instructions on reporting points and responsibilities in the event of fire and establish coordination with local civil or military fire-fighting authori-

13  Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration

ties. The plan will also lay down a programme for implementation of the preventative measures, and for the maintenance of access routes, noticeboards, water reservoirs, etc. Protection against insects, fungi, animals, birds and pests generally depend on the objectives of management. If the primary objective is conservation, then it may be decided to leave everything to nature and only intervene in extreme circumstances. If the objective is primarily production either with natural forest or plantations, then control measures for diseases will be necessary and should be specified. Most important diseases are either caused or transmitted by insect or are pathological diseases, usually caused by fungi and for both of these, the incidence of a disease may be more or less chronic or epidemic. Chronic diseases often imply that the species being attacked is not ideally suited to the site conditions for some reason such as climate change. Epidemic diseases alter on a cyclic basis, and infection generally builds up following some event, reaching a peak after which natural or artificial control begins to exercise some influence. Root rotting fungi such as Fomes annosus are typical chronic pathological diseases and they tend to be more prevalent in certain sites and with certain species. Control measures are available for many of these diseases, which generally aim at breaking part of the natural reproductive cycle of the disease. Many insect diseases are endemic. Most of these diseases have some natural control such as birds or climatic conditions, and the natural population of the disease is kept to a tolerably low level. However, if for some reason the natural control does not operate, then the insect population rapidly builds up and the outbreak becomes serious, until the natural control or some artificial measures can be made effective. For these situations it is advisable to be able to monitor the population of the insect, so that a population build-up can be quickly detected and measures applied to bring it under control. Techniques have been developed for monitoring population levels of a

Management Tasks

variety of insects and fungi, and these should be applied as appropriate. In natural forests there may be little that can be done, and usually the mix of species and ages of trees means that diseases do not spread far and wide and things can be left to nature. With plantations, especially monocultures there is a high risk of a disease wiping out a whole crop, so some form of protection is necessary. Protective measures vary widely according to the particular disease, but chemicals can be used in controlling many insects and fungi. Application of chemicals can be very expensive and there is a risk of the pest becoming resistant to a chemical as well as harmful side-effects on non-harmful plants, insects and animals. Chemical sprays should therefore only be applied with great care and only after a careful review of possible harmful side-effects. Many diseases can be controlled by natural methods, such as encouraging the build-up of population of natural predators or competitors. The latter is particularly effective in the case of root rotting fungi, if more rapid growing fungi can be found that will decay cut stumps before the root rotting fungus can become established. Forest hygiene can make an important contribution towards minimising diseases and especially under plantation conditions where management is fairly intensive. Many measures are quite practicable. They include the removal of all felled wood as quickly as possible as well as the quick removal of diseased or dying trees, which can act as a source of infection. Any special measures needed to protect the crop against natural and climatic hazards, such as grazing animals, drought, wind, frost, etc., should be specified. Where fencing is required, the type and dimensions should be described. Animals can be a major source of damage to forests ranging from the devastation caused by a herd of elephants, right down to the almost equally serious loss that can be caused by small rodents such as mice and voles. It is important first to identify all the animals that might cause damage, including all wild animals and domestic animals that might graze within the forest, either legally or illegally. Grazing in the forest can often

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be permitted if the trees are tall enough to avoid damage to the leading shoots. However, when there is young planting or regeneration it can be very damaging. Frequently plantation projects occupy land that was formerly grazed and it may be necessary to arrange for special areas to be set aside for grazing. The carrying capacity of these areas can often be greatly increased by more intensive management, especially cultivation, reseeding and fertilising, so that the effect of the loss of land to forestry can be considerably reduced, and thereby assisting the protection of the forest. For wild animals or domestic animals which must be excluded it will be necessary to construct fences, or in the case of elephants, trenches, to keep them out of the forest. These will have to be of suitable construction, of adequate height and strength to exclude whichever animals are involved and it may be necessary to have a multipurpose fence to exclude more than one type. The cost of fencing can be very expensive especially if materials have to be transported a long way. As the length of fence per unit area enclosed decreases with increasing size of enclosure, it is desirable to enclose as large a block as possible within one fence. Modern materials such as high tensile steel wire and polypropylene or nylon netting, if suitably dyed for protection against U.V. light, can substantially reduce handling and erection costs especially if posts can be put at greater distances apart. Fences must be properly maintained and gates well-constructed. Cattle grids are preferable on main roads. Climatic factors are the most difficult of all the environmental factors to control, but nevertheless a degree of protection can be afforded against some of the extremes, by adopting a somewhat scientific approach. (a) Wind is a problem in some areas and the frequency of occurrence of damaging winds can generally be predicted. If the probability of a strong wind during the lifetime of a crop is high, then clearly some protective measures are justified.

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Trees will be damaged by wind, either through uprooting or breakage of the stem. There may be little that can be done to prevent damage from a severe event such as a tornado, and climate change may be increasing the risk. In natural forest it is usually old dominant trees, especially if they are diseased, that are blown over by the wind, and it is part of a natural cycle. It can be a problem if they cause widespread damage when they fall, especially if they are attached to other trees with climbers. Logging can also result in an increase in wind damage by opening up the canopy and exposing trees that were previously sheltered in the lower canopy. For plantations the root development of trees can be influenced by soil cultivation and draining, so that the risk of wind damage can be reduced. The stem development is largely a function of the spacing of the trees, and provided root development is adequate, heavy thinning can promote stem diameter growth and reduce the risk of the trees snapping in high winds. (b) Water in excess can be a problem, either through waterlogging the soil and killing roots or by flooding the surface, eroding the soil and washing away young trees. The presence of trees will help to reduce the risk of soil erosion. Access roads can cause problems by either obstructing the natural flow of the excess water during storms or by acting as a channel that can result in local flooding. (c) Temperature extremes cannot be avoided, but their harmful effect can be ameliorated to some extent. Air temperature changes in relation to the radiation balance and as temperature differentials are set up between different locations the air will begin to move. Thus hot air rises and draws cool air in, while cold air sinks into hollows and may cause local frost. By adjusting the structure of the forest in relation to the configuration of the ground it is possible to regulate air movement to some extent and reduce the extreme effects of temperature in certain localities.

13  Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration

Roads and Access The need for access to the interior parts of a forest depends on the objectives of management. A Protected Area will need few roads in order to discourage access unless it is proposed to develop ecotourism, in which case some footpaths or tracks for four wheel drive vehicles may be enough. In forests that are to be managed for production a road network will be required. During the early years after establishment of a Forest Management Unit, unless it has already been the subject of logging, roads are primarily required for access for patrolling and inventory and for fire protection. The main vehicles will be relatively light personnel carrying vehicles and small trucks carrying materials and equipment. There is generally no requirement for very heavy-duty roads until some logging starts nor for a very intensive network. However, there is no point in constructing roads to be abandoned later so that as far as possible the initial access road system should be related to the eventual system that will be required for harvesting. Roads can be classified according to their usage with main through roads carrying much more traffic than spur roads. Specifications should be drawn up for each class of road. Bridging can be an important aspect of road construction in some forests, and wherever possible standard designs should be used. Timber bridges may be suitable if there are sufficient local supplies of suitable wood and a number of excellent basic designs exist. ITTO (2010) gives a considerable amount of information on road design and construction, including bridges, and Longland (1936) and Harrison (1951) cover low cost simple timber bridges, as well as useful basic design information for both roads and bridges. Properly designed and constructed bridges are to be preferred to just dumping a few logs, which rot in time and emit carbon dioxide in the process. If they are durable species they could be put to better use, or at least used to construct a proper bridge. A substantial part of the cost of constructing roads is for the production and transportation of

Roads and Access

suitable road metalling. There is a temptation to leave roads unmetalled and this is feasible on certain soils and in certain climates. If the road is cambered, graded and compacted adequately, earth roads can be satisfactory, but if the essential work is frequently held up due to the bad condition of the roads—metalling will become justified. Some expenditure on a search for suitable metalling material is justified, if the transportation costs can be significantly reduced. Riverbeds and rock outcrops are obvious sources but suitable material may be available in buried gravel beds or in the bedrock if they can be located. A careful study of relief maps and air photographs, if available, can often pinpoint likely places for a more detailed investigation on the ground. The construction of roads will result in savings in the cost of transporting men and materials and fire-fighting equipment round the forest, as well as reduced costs for vehicle maintenance, and the total investment in a road network should be related to the magnitude of the savings that can be obtained. A basic road density of about 3 m/ha is generally adequate for access and fire protection when fire risk is low, but this may usefully and economically be doubled when fire risk is high. The costs of labour and road construction are so variable from place to place that it is impossible to give a universally applicable guide to road density. The specification of the various grades of road should be set out with drawings to indicate the main dimensions, width of cleared strip, width of surface, depth of the surface layer, the type of surface material, the camber of the surface, the width, depth, profile and gradient of roadside ditches and the maximum gradients of the road, with the absolute maximum allowable on short stretches, the limiting radius of curvature of bends, culverting and bridging specifications should all be given. A master road plan for the project area should be prepared giving the planned phased development, e.g. Phase I—initial access and fire protection; Phase II—extension to aid logging operations; Phase III—final road network. The phasing will take into account the need for bridge-building, the location of labour residences and the need to link up to other

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communities with the public road system. A road maintenance schedule should also be given specifying how and when maintenance will be carried out. In some countries, a system whereby loaded logging trucks travelling towards the log pond can use the inside on all bends is in operation. Thus if driving on the right is the local convention, loaded trucks cross to the left side for a left hand bend and vice versa. This can be extremely dangerous and is not recommended, though it may save a few seconds in the travel time. The investment in a basic road system is generally quite considerable, especially if bridges have been built and the roads properly surveyed and the surfaces metalled. The roads will deteriorate steadily due in part to usage and in part to the action of the vegetation and climate. Generally the latter two factors become more important in the wetter and hotter climates of the tropics. If the roads are expected to be used again when the crop is ready for further harvesting, then it is probably cheaper to expend a modest sum annually to maintain the existing investment, rather than to allow it to deteriorate and have to re-invest a substantial sum at the time of harvesting. Generally speaking annual maintenance costs are about 2–4% of the original construction cost so that the accumulated maintenance charges over a period of about 25–30 years are of the same order as the cost of construction. If the roads are to be used again in less than that period and would deteriorate completely without maintenance, then clearly it is cheaper to maintain existing roads rather than build new ones. The construction of logging roads is intimately tied up with the in-forest and long-haul transportation methods chosen. The terrain will to a very large extent determine the roading cost and generally speaking the easier the terrain and the cheaper the road cost, the more advantageous it is to have a high density road network, with short cross-country skidding distances and most of the transportation being done on the relatively fast road vehicles. As road constructions costs increase, it generally becomes cheaper overall to increase skidding distances and reduce road density. However, the

13  Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration

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road density at which the extra cost of constructing more roads is about equal to the extra cost of skidding a bit further is dependent to some extent on the amount being harvested per unit area. A number of empirical formulae are available for calculating the optimum road density (D) and the one given in the F.A.0. Manual “Logging and Log Transport” is D is the road density in metres ha

D = 10000 / k 40. R.L / q.c.t. (1 + p )

where k  =  a correction factor for road winding and dead-end spurs varies between 1.00 and 0.71, R = cost in U.S$ per km of road construction and maintenance, L  =  average skidder/forwarder load, q  =  quantity harvested per unit area—m3/ ha, c = operating cost US$ per minute of skidder/ forwarder, t = average time per m3 for return trip of skidder/forwarder stump to road and p = correction factor for winding of skid trails—varies between 0 and 0.5. As an example: • Road construction cost R  =  US$ 12,000 per km • Average skidder load L = 4 m3 • Average harvest m3/ha q = 40 m3 • Average operating cost for skidder c  =  US$ 0.80 per minute • Average skidder return trip time t = 0.032 min/ m3/m • Winding factor p = 0.5 Then D = 7.75 m per ha. At this road density and construction cost, the investment in roads for harvesting is about US$ 93 per ha with a further US$ 1.80 per ha for maintenance. Treating the surface with various chemicals to improve binding and reduce weed growth can reduce road maintenance costs and if these also result in higher travel speeds their cost can often be justified.

Yield Regulation For forests that are to be managed sustainably for timber production the regulation of the yield is the most important aspect of management. The aim is to determine the level of harvest removal that will be balanced by new growth following the harvest, with a small allowance for unexpected losses that may occur due to fire, disease or storm damage. There are now a number of models available that can simulate the growth of a mixed tropical forest after logging and provide guidance on how frequent the harvesting cycle should be and how much can safely be harvested each time, e.g. FORMIX-3 (Huth et  al. 1997), Malaysia, and SYMFOR (Phillips et  al. 2003), Indonesia. Schiffer et al. (2015), Clark et al. (2003) and Dong et al. (2015) discuss the impact of climate change on the growth of tropical forests and suggest that warmer temperatures may lead to lower growth despite the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These models have been developed in research forests in one part of the world, and do not necessarily work well for different forests in other parts of the world. Ashraf et  al. (2015) and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2007), respectively, describe models called JABOWA-3 and Vorest that have been developed for temperate forests in Eastern North America. It is important to test the models and verify that they are providing a good representation of the forest in question. This can be done by establishing some Permanent Sample Plots in representative parts of the forest and monitoring their growth over a period of years and comparing the results with the model predictions. If the model is found to give a good representation of reality, then it can be used for examining a number of harvesting options to determine the best regime to follow. The options to be looked at are various combinations of the harvesting intensity (cubic metres per ha removed) and the harvesting ­frequency (years between successive harvests).

The Cost of Sustainability

Generally, if the harvesting intensity is high it will be longer before the next harvest can be undertaken. Each possible combination of intensity and frequency will have financial implications. Less intense harvesting means lower revenue and probably higher costs per cubic metre extracted, while lower frequency means that the present value of future harvests will be reduced, especially if a high discount rate is used. The preferred option to achieve sustainability may not be the most favourable from a financial or economic point of view. The additional cost or reduced revenue incurred as a result of following it compared with the most financially attractive option is part of the cost of achieving sustainability. It will however enable the forest to meet requirements for “certification” that could lead to slightly higher log prices, which may be enough to offset the difference.

Monitoring and Supervision Monitoring consists of two components: there is the monitoring of the forest to ensure that it is healthy and intact and is performing as expected, and there is monitoring of the activities to ensure that they have been completed as planned and are having the desired effect. The first is largely just observational and can be carried out during regular visits to all parts of the forest by members of staff. Each visit should be recorded and a log should be maintained noting the compartments visited and any notable observations made, such as wildlife sightings, fallen trees or evidence of unscheduled human activity. The second is more formal and needs to be linked to the various activities. Inspection visits should be scheduled to take place immediately after the time when a task is meant to have been completed. If the management objectives include carbon sequestration for which payments are expected, then monitoring the carbon stocks will need to be done by a third party. This will probably be negotiated with the buyer of the carbon credits when a deal is set up.

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The Cost of Sustainability It is clear from the discussion above that there are considerable additional costs involved in managing forests sustainably, compared with managing for maximum profit. The additional costs are not just one-off items for inventories and management plans, but must include the cost of additional human resources for implementing and monitoring all the necessary activities. This requires educating and training and capacity building, both at the technical and professional levels, and also with communities who need to be more engaged in the process and even undertake some of the management. As discussed earlier, much deforestation is driven by the global demand for various commodity crops, of which palm oil, soya beans, beef cattle and timber are the most prominent, but demand for rubber, coffee, sugar, fruit (bananas and pineapples), maize and others also contributes to deforestation in many places. Large multi-­ national corporations and small and medium private enterprises are involved in the process in many ways: some direct and some indirect. Those that are directly involved include forest product companies that manage logging concessions or plantations, as well as companies that clear forests to produce one or more of the commodity crops. These companies may also sponsor small farmers to clear forest and grow crops under contract. Those that are indirectly involved are companies that manufacture and market consumer products from the basic commodities, such as processed food, hamburgers, personal hygiene products, joinery wood products and house construction. In response to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, an increasing number of consumer product companies are assessing their supply chains to ensure that they are using only raw material that has not contributed to deforestation. A report by an environmental NGO (CDP 2016) describes the response from about 200 major companies to a questionnaire sent out on behalf of institutional investors, about the measures they have adopted to manage the risk of them contributing to deforestation through their supply chains.

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The respondents identified four major challenges that they face: • Lack of a traceability system, • Weak governance and compliance enforcement of national forest policies, • Limited availability of certified materials, and • Costs of certified materials. This illustrates the problem and the challenge to achieve sustainable forest management. Competition at the consumer end of the chain keeps prices low so that the additional costs at the

13  Costs of Forest Management and Regeneration

producer end of the chain cannot be passed on. Forestry companies that try to manage their forest sustainably put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against companies that are only concerned with maximising their profit. While pressure from consumers in the developed countries will certainly push companies involved in forest management to strive for sustainability, the problem of deforestation is primarily a problem for tropical developing countries where local demand for all the commodities is growing and consumers are less able to bear the additional costs that sustainability requires.

International and Global Issues

Conflicting Sustainable Development Goals Forests and the way they are managed around the world are of international concern, in part because of their role in the atmospheric exchange of carbon dioxide and in part because the environmental consequences of deforestation are likely to threaten food security. Environmental deterioration resulting from deforestation can exacerbate drought and floods and lead to declining soil fertility that reduces yields of crops. There is a conflict between the Sustainable Development Goals, especially numbers 1 and 2 that are concerned with Poverty and Hunger and number 15 that targets sustainable forest management. One of the targets for reducing poverty is to secure equal rights of access for all to economic resources, including land, but in the past this has meant clearing some forest to provide land for landless people who want to be farmers. Achieving food security and abolishing hunger and malnutrition requires increased agricultural productivity, which in the past has meant expanding agriculture rather than increasing inputs to produce more from the same land. The Sustainable Development Goal for reducing hunger envisages an investment in agriculture of US$ 267 billion annually until 2030. It’s not clear if this is for infrastructure, research and extension,

14

which are specifically mentioned as targets or if it also includes increased inputs such as fertilisers, improved seeds and mechanisation. According to the World Bank and FAO data there were 4.92 billion ha of land used for agriculture in 2017 so that the target investment represents annually about US$ 54 per ha. A similar level of investment for sustainable forest management on the 1.6 billion ha that has been reported as “Permanent Forest Estate” to the FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment would amount to about US$ 92 billion and would provide an incentive to manage forest rather than clear it. Köthke (2014) reviewed a number of studies by United Nations Agencies and other authors that estimated the cost of achieving sustainable forest management. The Intergovernmental Forum on Forests in 1998 estimated that around US$ 70 billion were needed, though it did not specify what the funds were needed for. The estimate in Chap. 5 (Table 5.2), of the additional human resources required to build the capacity to manage forests sustainably, alone could cost US$ 17.5 billion for all regions including the temperate region that has a greater number of wealthier nations. With most of the deforestation taking place in poor developing countries such a level of funding is clearly needed from the international community as they do not have the resources themselves and understandably have other priorities for their limited financial resources.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_14

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 arket Failure for Forests M and Forest Products There are two ways in which market failure influences what happens to forests. The first relates to the value of timber, which is valued in the market at more or less the cost of its harvesting plus operator profit and a small royalty to the owner rather than at its replacement cost as a renewable natural resource. This means that there is little incentive to manage forests as a renewable resource. The second failure is that the market does not value the ecological and environmental services that forests provide, with the result that the opportunity cost of clearing forest is very low compared with most alternative uses for the land. In tropical moist forests that are selectively logged the average diameter of trees currently being harvested is around 70  cm and about 40–50  m3 per ha are harvested. After logging there will be trees with diameters in the range 25–45 cm that can be expected to reach diameters similar to those currently being harvested in around 30 years. At current log prices the total stumpage received by the owner from the current harvest is around US$ 2500 per ha. If one assumes that the revenue that will be received from the next harvest in 30 years’ time is the same, then the Present Value of the future revenue discounted at 5% is about US$ 580 per ha and at 10% is about US$ 42 per ha. This compares with an estimated Net Present Value for an oil palm plantation at 5% and 10%, respectively, of US$ 20,775 and US$ 10,670, according to Svatoňová et al. (2015). With a Forest Management Unit of around 100,000  ha the area harvested annually with a 30-year rotation will be around 3000 ha, allowing for some High Conservation Value areas and other unproductive land. The Present Value of the future annual revenue is about US$ 861 per ha at 5% discount rate and US$ 316 per ha at 15% discount rate. The initial investment costs for boundary marking are US$ 10 per ha, (US$ 1 million for the whole area), inventory costs US$ 15 per ha (US$ 1.5 million) and road construction and maintenance each year US$ 93 per ha (see Chap. 13).

14  International and Global Issues

Thereafter there are annual road construction and maintenance costs, silvicultural operations, forest protection and management costs. These costs like performance bonds discussed earlier (Chap. 5, Table 5.1) are either met by the forest owner and must be paid out of the revenue from stumpage fees or if met by the harvesting operator will be passed on to the owner in the form of reduced stumpage rather than taking a reduced profit. The NPV does not compare favourably with the alternative land-uses such as oil palm mentioned above, and most other crops such as coffee, pepper or cattle (see Chap. 11). Some economists argue that the forest provides such a low return that it is better to clear it and replace with something that gives a higher yield, but this takes no account of the environmental cost of losing the forest nor the value of the ecological services provided by forests in the tropics nor the socio-economic cost of the loss of access to a wide range of valuable non-timber forest products to local communities. The natural forest can never be restored once it is lost and plantations do not perform the same ecological and environmental functions. Using FAO data on export volume and value for tropical logs it can be seen that the price of tropical logs over the past 25 years has more or less followed the average price for all commodities as tracked by the International Monetary Fund. Using the year 2005 as the base year for both indices the tropical log price was 15–25 points higher from 1992 to 2007. It then fell below the all commodity index for the period from 2007 to 2012, and since then has risen above the all commodity index by about 50%. The all commodity index fell sharply in 2015, while the tropical log price remained fairly steady, so the difference may be only temporary. If the real increase in the price of tropical log persists, it is likely to have both a positive and a negative impact. The positive impact may be that the wood processing industry is incentivised to improve its efficiency and use slightly fewer logs to continue producing the same output of finished products. The negative impact is likely to be an increase in illegal logging as wood processors,

Natural Capital Accounting

especially in poor developing countries try to get cheaper logs. The challenge to achieving sustainable forest management is how to increase the financial value of forests to reflect their economic value, without promoting an increase in illegal logging, so that the opportunity cost of clearing forest is as great or greater than the alternative land-uses. One possible solution is to include the value of the carbon that the forests sequester and store. Unfortunately, if forest is being managed sustainably, the growing stock, and hence the carbon stock will remain more or less constant so that the forest is unable to earn additional revenue from carbon sequestration, unless the life cycle of the wood being harvested is taken into account. If the majority of the wood being harvested is used for durable products such as furniture, panelling, joinery and structural products, then the growth in the forest is making a net contribution to carbon sequestration. However, if a corporation that wishes to clear forest for a commodity crop or livestock is required to pay for the carbon that is stored in the forest, it will increase the costs for establishing the alternative and so raise the opportunity cost of forest clearance. This has the advantage that it increases the value of the forest without creating an incentive to log illegally. One way in which this might be achieved is for greenhouse gas emitters to enter into a contract with the forest owner (state or private) to purchase the carbon in the forest with the condition that they will be refunded should any carbon be lost. This is a form of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation (RED), (no degradation) and would provide the funds for the sustainable management of the forest. The hypothetical Forest Management Unit of 100,000 ha (already mentioned) would probably contain about 20 million tonnes of carbon that is equivalent to about 75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. If it was purchased at the current market price for carbon dioxide of US$ 7.40 per tonne (see Chap. 8) it would be worth around US$ 540 million. It would not necessarily all have to be purchased at once, but could be in annual

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instalments based on periodic sample inventories. This would provide the funds to manage the forest properly, while also providing a big incentive to protect the forest from any interference, by illegal loggers or encroaching farmers. The contract should allow for the emitter to be reimbursed for any carbon dioxide emitted from logs harvested, legally or illegally. No doubt, such a scheme would face problems relating to a baseline level of emissions. If a Forest Management Unit is established in an area where forest has been lost over the years, and new boundaries are established around an area that is declared as a permanent Forest Management Unit, it should be possible to consider the historic forest losses in the administrative jurisdiction as the baseline and accept that if no further losses of carbon stocks in the forest (other than agreed harvesting) take place then a reduction in emissions has been achieved.

Natural Capital Accounting The System of National Accounts introduced by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) in 1968 deals with all the market-based economic activities within a national economy. During the 1980s it was recognised that it did not provide a complete picture of the economy, because, among other things, it did not take account of changes in the value of the country’s Natural Capital that includes forests. Unsustainable exploitation of forests would deplete the value of the asset but it would not show up in the national accounts, while the goods produced from the excess timber harvested would show up as a contribution to GDP. Over the years the concept has shifted from Natural Resource Accounting to a System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA), of which the latest version was published in 2012. However these accounts are separate from the National Accounts that measure the GDP so that the public that by and large focuses on GDP does not get the full picture of their country’s wealth and how it has changed over the years.

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Since about 2012 the World Bank has been implementing the Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) programme in a number of countries to try to rectify the situation and provide policy and decision makers with a more complete picture of the country’s wealth that takes account of changes in its Natural Capital. One of the country studies is for the Philippines, and it reports that Natural Capital accounts for about 15% of the nation’s wealth, of which 68% is the value of the agricultural land, while forests account for 3%. What does not appear in the accounts is the reduction in the value of the forest capital that over the years has been converted to agricultural capital. The country was a major exporter of timber and timber products during the 1970s and is now a net importer at considerable cost. The country also regularly suffers from devastating typhoons that frequently cause floods and landslides that are usually exacerbated by loss of forest cover. Agricultural land on steep slopes may be worth less than forest.

Cross-Border and Trade Issues The main forestry related cross-border issue is the transfer of illegally felled logs between neighbouring countries. This has implications for the sustainable management of forests in the country from which the logs are taken, and may also mean that the importing country is achieving a degree of sustainability in its own forest by transferring its deforestation to another country. Much has been written about the cross-border flow of logs from Lao PDR and Cambodia to Vietnam, already referred to in Chap. 10, which has resulted in massive deforestation and forest degradation in the two countries from which the logs are taken and claims by Vietnam that its forest area has increased. Meyfroidt and Lambin (2009) studied the development of the wood processing industry in Vietnam during the period from 1986 to 2005. They compared the domestic production and the recorded imports of legally sourced logs with the

14  International and Global Issues

output from the industry and concluded that by 2005 there was an annual deficit of about 4 million cubic metres that could only be explained by unrecorded and probably illegal imports. They considered that this was in effect displacing potential deforestation in Vietnam to other countries because Vietnam had placed restrictions on the harvesting from its own forests, while encouraging the wood processing industry to increase exports. In 2002, during the time covered by the study, exports of wood products from Vietnam mainly furniture were valued at around US$ 530 million and the government target for 2004 was to increase exports to US$ 1 billion. Since their study, the wood processing industry has expanded enormously and in 2017 reported that it had exported US$ 8 billion of wood products, mostly furniture for which it required around 20 million cubic metres of logs. According to ITTO and FAO, Vietnam imported logs, sawnwood, plywood and veneers in 2016 totalling about 5 million cubic metres roundwood equivalent, which according to COMTRADE was valued at US$ 2.71 billion but did not include any imports from Lao PDR or Cambodia. This is equivalent to US$ 542 per cubic metre, which is very high and suggests that the actual volume may be much higher. In 2016, Smirnov reported to the Environmental Inspection Agency on the illegal cross-border trade between the four southern provinces of Lao PDR and Vietnam. He concluded that the actual log harvest was about double the officially authorised quota and that about three quarters of the logs harvested (including the illegal harvest) were exported to Vietnam as logs and as partly processed timber, mostly just logs that had been sawn to squares. Most of the illegal logging was associated with land clearance for infrastructure and mining, mainly funded through Foreign Direct Investment from Vietnam and China. The areas to be cleared were not properly inventoried and mapped so that much logging took place far outside the area required for the particular purpose that had been approved. He noted that the Draft for the Voluntary Partnership Agreement between Vietnam and the EU being negotiated

International Agreements

under FLEGT said that wood products from Vietnam would be legally imported into Vietnam, rather than being legally harvested in the country of origin. A report on re-structuring the wood processing industry in Lao PDR (Fraser 2009) investigated in detail 22 wood processing plants, including primary processors with sawmills and plywood mills and secondary processors producing joinery products, parquet flooring and furniture. The total annual volume of logs used by the sampled companies was 155,000 m3 and the volume of final products was 39,300  m3, giving a recovery factor of only 25%, but only one-third of the output was sawn timber and the rest was secondary products including furniture. The study included one factory that processed residues, but the bulk of the residues were either burnt or dumped somewhere to rot. The sampled companies exported 30,400 m3 of products with a roundwood equivalent of 131,000  m3 and the export value was US$ 9.56 million giving an average value of US$ 72 per cubic metre roundwood equivalent, which is very low, and represents a serious financial loss for Lao PDR. In 2008, which was the latest year available at the time of the study, the COMTRADE data showed that Vietnam imported US$ 83.6 million worth of wood products from Lao PDR, which would have been around 1.1 million cubic metres roundwood equivalent at that average price. These inconsistencies in production and trade data are common and are usually associated with illegal trade, but they have major implications for sustainable forest management and for carbon emissions, sequestering and trading. By importing wood products from another country whether legally or illegally, the importing country is displacing some of it emissions to the country from which it imports. Thus the apparent emissions of carbon dioxide in the exporting country may appear to be high, while the country

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that imports may appear to be a net sink for carbon dioxide. If the logging in the exporting country is partly unrecorded and illegal, it may result in an overestimation of the carbon dioxide emissions, because growing stock, and hence carbon, will have been lost but not necessarily converted to carbon dioxide if it finishes up as furniture or structural timber in buildings. The importing country does not pay for any carbon that is emitted in the logging process due to damage and residues left to rot in the forest. Any REDD+ investment in the exporting country is therefore supporting the illegal logging process and is compensating the country for failing to protect its forests and monitor and record properly what is going on. This applies as much to the legal trade in forest products when exporting results in illegal logging due to shortages of raw material to meet the needs of the domestic market as discussed in Chap. 10. With world population and economic growth demand for timber and other wood-based products, especially paper is likely to grow steadily. If measures to curb the use of plastic for packaging are successful it is likely to result in an additional increase in the use of paper. This all means that the pressure on forests will increase and countries with a deficit in their own supply of wood raw material will need to import. Sourcing wood products from “sustainably managed forests” will not be good enough if it drives illegal logging in exporting countries or their neighbours.

International Agreements International agreements and aid can help, but only at the margin as the issues that prevent forests being managed sustainably are so massive and complex.

Part V The Way Forward

Verification of Sustainability

Since 1970 the world annual consumption of industrial roundwood has grown from 1.276 billion cubic metres to 1.885 billion cubic metres in 2017. During the same period the world population has grown from 3.708 billion to 7.550 billion. Between 1970 and 1990 the per capita consumption of industrial roundwood declined slightly, but it stabilised after 1990 at around 0.250 cubic metres per caput. The decline during the 1970s and 1980s may have been due to higher population growth in the relatively poor developing countries. Since the beginning of the twenty first century the annual increase in industrial roundwood consumption has been around 16 million cubic metres. Assuming that per capita consumption does not increase, the demand for industrial roundwood will be around 2.19 billion cubic metres by 2030 (an annual increase of about 19 million cubic metres), when the Sustainable Development Goal hopes to have all forests managed sustainably. Economic growth and the reduction of poverty may well see demand growing more than that. So the question is: “Can the world’s forests supply such a quantity of timber sustainably without loss of further forest and reduction in biodiversity”? With just 500 million ha of “certified” forest it means that production must be increased each year by about 0.04 cubic metres per ha to achieve the 0.5 cubic metres per ha per annum required by 2030. The average annual increase in the total

15

growing stock between 2010 and 2015 was 0.27 cubic metres per ha (see Table 15.1) so by 2025 the increased production required will just about match the current increase in growing stock. After that, if nothing changes, the additional production required will exceed the growth in the growing stock on the currently “certified” forest area. An increase in the forest area “certified” or an increase in the growth in “certified” forests will postpone the day when demand exceeds the sustainable supply, but it is not far in the future. There seem to be two priorities for the immediate future: • Secure all the remaining primary forest and designate it all as permanent forest (1.23 billion ha), of which about 46% are tropical forests, 46% are temperate forests and 8% are sub-tropical. • Certify all the designated production forest and ensure that it is all part of the Permanent Forest Estate (1.17 billion ha) of which 52% are temperate forests, 30% are tropical and 14% are sub-tropical. Most of the remaining primary forest should be conserved to sustain biodiversity and environmental services, so it will mean a big expansion of the Permanent Forest Estate in most countries from the current total of about 1.66 billion ha to 2.4 billion ha so that production forest excludes all primary forest. Much of the expansion will

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_15

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Table 15.1  Forest growing stock and increment in each of the major ecological regions together with the current consumption of industrial roundwood Growing stock (billion m3)

Temperate Subtropical Equatorial Rest of World Total

Forest area (million ha)

Growing stock density (m3/ha)

Consumption

2010 199 61 215 5

2015 203 61 213 5

2010 1689 825 1425 76

2015 1692 828 1405 75

2010 118 73 151 66

2015 120 74 152 68

Increment (m3/ha/an) 0.74 0.15 0.30 0.03

480

483

4015

3999

119

121

0.27

(m3/caput) 0.927 0.107 0.207 0.028

(m3/ha/an) 0.66 0.51 0.23 0.30

0.276

0.47

Source: FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment 2015

need to be plantations to meet growth in demand after 2030. Table 15.1 shows the current situation regarding the total growing stock, total forest area and apparent increment together with estimates of the total annual consumption of industrial roundwood in each of the major ecological regions. The increment has been calculated by comparing the growing stock density in 2015 with 2010 and taking account of any growing stock that has been lost due to loss of forest area. There are two assumptions in the calculations: any loss of forest area is assumed to have had the average growing stock density in 2010, and any additional forest area is assumed to be new plantations with no measureable growing stock. The consumption is the total roundwood produced in the region divided by the population and does not take account of imports and exports, so that it is not the final consumption, but as the volumes traded are a relatively small proportion of the total it gives a reasonable approximation and reflects the actual pressure on the forest. The data shows that all the regions appear to have a deficit in that the consumption of industrial roundwood, when measured per ha of forest in the region, exceeds the average increment. Globally the consumption is almost double the increment. This may overstate the actual situation as the increment is calculated as the average for the whole forest area that includes areas of quite open forest in accordance with the FAO definition. The “certified” forests may have a higher increment, but with only 500 million ha, meeting the annual demand of 2 billion cubic metres is a tall order

and requires an average annual increment of around 5 cubic metres per ha. The PEFC (Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certification) defines Sustainable Forest Management as “The environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of forests for present and future generations”. This is essentially the same as the definition given by Forest Europe quoted in Chap. 2 but is a little simpler and gives no clue as to how it can be achieved.

Criteria and Indicators Much discussion over the years has gone into developing Criteria and Indicators (C&I) for deciding whether forest at regional, national and local level is being managed sustainably. The process was started by ITTO in 1993, since when 12 regional groupings of countries have developed their own set of Criteria and Indicators that are relevant to the forest conditions in their region. In 2003 the ITTO also helped China to develop C&I. Table 15.2 shows the general structure of the Criteria and Indicators for 8 of the groupings that cover most of the temperate, boreal and tropical forests. The other four groups cover arid and dry zone forests. Table 15.2 shows that most of these systems recognise seven Criteria that correspond to the main goals for forest management, namely: (1) Permanence of the forest, (2) Forest condition and health, (3) Ecosystem protection, (4) Forest products, (5) Ecosystem services, (6) Environmental

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Criteria and Indicators

Table 15.2  General structure of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management in eight regional groupings Regional group Pan-Europe ITTO Montreal Terapole Lepaterque ATO ASEAN Total

Level National/FMU National/FMU National/FMU Regional FMU Regional National/FMU National/FMU National/FMU

Principles

5

services and (7) Social and economic services. The order in which they are listed varies between groups and perhaps indicates the relative importance that each of the groups attaches to each of the Criteria. Some put the enabling conditions, such as the institutional arrangements and the regulatory framework, first and some put it last. The Lepaterque Group, that covers Central America, has an additional Criterion that covers science and technology, while the Terapole Group, that covers the Amazon basin countries, has science and technology as a Criterion but does not have one for Forest Health. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Group has subsidiary or more explicit Indicators for many of the main Indicators. The African Timber Organisation (ATO) has a different structure from the others with 5 principles and 25 Criteria. Both the Criteria and the Indicators in the ATO scheme are much more explicit than the other groups and include the availability of maps as a criterion. It deals with the “nuts and bolts” of forest management with a whole series of indicators that address many of the major issues such as the legal basis for the Permanent Forest Estate, marking of boundaries, management plans, encroachment into the forest and illegal logging, which are not covered explicitly by any of the others. The Montreal Group is the only one that has the forest carbon as a Criterion, while the Pan-­ European has forest carbon as an indicator. The ASEAN Group are much more explicit on biodiversity than any of the others, with their subsid-

Criteria 7 7 7 7 4 4 8 25 7

Indicators 52 58 54 47 22 40 53 59 67/144

Number of countries 46 30 12 8 6 13 12 127

iary indicators seeking data at the Taxa level, while most of the other groups just mention “genetic resources” or “endangered species” without being specific. The number of Indicators for assessing whether or not a country’s forests or individual Forest Management Units are being managed sustainably varies both in number and in their nature with most being descriptive or qualitative. The ITTO system has 57 indicators and the Pan-­ European system has 35 “quantitative” and 17 “qualitative” indicators; the latter being related to the enabling conditions. However, some of the indicators that are considered quantitative are in fact really qualitative. A major output resulting from the adoption of the Pan-European Criteria and Indicators has been a series of “The State of European Forests” reports, with the most recent one in 2015. This illustrates the difficulties in applying the system in practice and in drawing conclusions as to whether Europe’s forests are actually being managed sustainably. The report summarises the responses received from member countries for each of the 42 Indicators, but not all member countries have responded to all the Indicators. Indicator No. 2 for Criterion 2 (maintenance of ecosystem health) is “soil conditions”, but it seems that this only covers soil organic carbon, which has been sampled across Europe by a special survey. There is no measure of soil acidification, which could be a problem affecting sustainability, especially with widespread use of conifer monoculture plantations. Indicator 6 for

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15  Verification of Sustainability

Criterion 4 (maintenance, conservation and made a positive contribution to all domains, enhancement of biological diversity and ecosys- though they did not say how much C&I systems tems) is “genetic resources” which deals only had contributed as opposed to other discussions with in situ conservation of select trees and seed and activities. They drew attention to the fact that stands. The Qualitative Indicator No. 6 for none of the Indicators has a threshold value, Criterion B (Policy, Institutions and Instruments above or below which sustainability can be conby policy area) that relates to “Biodiversity” sidered as having been achieved, and indicated mainly deals with the regulatory framework for that this was a major political problem during protecting species. Neither of these Indicators negotiations, because many countries considered gives an indication as to whether populations of that only they could decide what is sustainable. any species are increasing or decreasing and The lack of any threshold values and the use whether threatened or endangered species are in of words such as “appropriate” render many of a better or worse condition. the indicators more or less meaningless. For The European Forestry Institute (2013) example, an indicator such as “an adequate numreviewed the implementation of the Pan-­ ber of trained personnel” begs the questions of European C&I by the 46 member countries and “how many is adequate”? and “what is the approthe European Commission. Among other things, priate balance of numbers with professional, they found that not all countries were able to pro- technical and skills education and training”? vide all the data required for all the indicators, Similarly the “forest area as a proportion of the and that one of the reasons for the lack of data total land area” is also meaningless. An arid was the cost of collecting it relative to its value. country that is mostly desert could have 1% of its They made recommendations for substantial land area as permanent and sustainably managed revision of the Indicators, but felt that the Criteria forest, while a humid country in the tropics or the should remain unchanged, as it had been a very boreal region could have 60% of its land under difficult process to get them agreed in the first forest, but fail to protect it from encroachment, place. They also recommended that the indicators illegal logging, fire and other threats, while also need to be developed in such a way as to facilitate neglecting to ensure that it is regenerating propexchange of information with other sectors such erly after logging. However, changes in the proas energy, agriculture and nature conservation, portion of the land area covered in forest over since this has been lacking in the past due to time is an indicator that has been used in the past, incompatibility of data between sectors. A sig- but it can give a misleading impression if good nificant number of countries did not respond to primary forest is disappearing and being replaced the investigation and had either not used them or with monocultures of exotic species. had not found them useful. The African Timber Organisation Criteria and Linser et al. (2018) under the auspices of the Indicators seem to be the most helpful, in that International Union of Forest Research they focus mainly on what needs to be done at the Organisations (IUFRO) reviewed the overall Forest Management Unit level, which is the critiimpact of all 12 C&I systems in use around the cal place for action. While the enabling environworld. They assessed the impact of the systems ment is important in creating the conditions against a number of what they referred to as necessary to achieve sustainable forest manageDomains of C&I impact: (1) enhanced discourse ment it’s the detail of how things are implemented relating to Sustainable Forest Management, (2) in the field that will really determine the outcome. engagement of science, (3) improved monitoring It needs good, well-educated, conscientious and and reporting of Sustainable Forest Management, dedicated managers supported by well-trained (4) strengthened forest management practices, technical staff at each Forest Management Unit (5) facilitated measurement of progress and (6) to prepare and implement well thought out improved forest related dialogue and communi- Management Plans. It is also the only scheme cation. They concluded that the C&I systems had that specifically mentions the use of “Low Impact

Criteria and Indicators

Logging”, the need for a plantation establishment plan, the need for a balance between supply and demand and the need for management plans to recognise the needs of the local market. If the tropical forests are managed in conformity with the ATO Criteria, then Sustainable Forest Management is achievable. Politicians have committed to the Sustainable Development Goals and public money is invested by governments and through multi-lateral and bi-­ lateral aid agencies in trying to achieve the sustainable management of all forests, so that it is imperative that ways can be found to verify that progress is being made. The various Criteria and Indicators help, but there is a lack of means for assessing progress with sustaining the ecosystem and environmental services. Forest inventory techniques assisted by technology such as satellite images and LIDAR are able to monitor forest biomass growing stock and carbon, but there is still uncertainty about all the conversion factors used to estimate carbon from measurements of tree stems or remotely sensed Vegetation Indices. There is also lack of information about the life cycle of wood and how it should be accounted for in estimating emissions from Land-use, Land-use Change and Forestry (LULUCF). When forest growing stock declines between inventories there is no easy way of knowing whether it has been burnt, left to rot or harvested and converted into some useful product. There are residues from the conversion process that may be burnt or in some cases they are chipped and used for making panel products. With modern preservative techniques many of these products will keep the carbon locked up for a very long time. The temperate forests by and large are being managed sustainably for timber production in that growing stock and forest area are increasing slightly, but there is no information regarding the sustainability of the ecosystem and environmental services. Many temperate coniferous forests are subject to clear felling and there is little or no information about the impact of coupe size on biodiversity nor on the quality of the soil and the impact on the hydrological cycle. While areas that have been clear felled usually continue to be

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classed as forest on the assumption that they will regenerate, this has been problematic in some countries in the past. Sustainability depends on the areas being ready to harvest again at some point in the future. Biodiversity is not regularly monitored nor is water quality and flow, which are needed to verify that forest operations are being conducted properly. The tropical forests are more problematic for the sustainability of wood production because of the widespread occurrence of illegal and unrecorded logging. This is partly driven by the demand in the developed countries for tropical timber products, which impacts on the available supply of wood for the domestic market in the producer countries. It isn’t helped by the very low rates of recovery of product from logs, especially with the small-scale producers that mainly supply domestic markets. Tropical forests are also much more complex than temperate forests with hugely greater numbers of species and age and size classes of trees. Mention has already been made of the use of low cost biodiversity surveys (Chap. 7) and community monitoring of water quality (Chap. 12) and these and similar low cost methods should be more widely used to verify that sustainability in the full sense of the concept is being achieved. The great advantage of involving local communities in monitoring is that it raises awareness of what is happening to the environment and the impact that human activity is having. In the developed countries people with reasonable incomes can afford to volunteer to help with such monitoring and many conservation groups already have volunteer helpers that could be used to monitor wildlife and water. Even in developing countries, as the study by Deutsch et al. (1998) referred to in Chap. 12 shows, local communities are willing to do monitoring on a voluntary basis if it is not too demanding of time. Understanding what sustainable forest management actually means is an evolving process, and as improved techniques increase knowledge of what is happening in the forest and how human interventions influence the ecosystems and the environment the complexity of the task becomes increasingly apparent. Different forest types in

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different regions of the world require different management strategies to achieve sustainability. This means that the criteria for sustainable forest management must be adapted as new knowledge becomes available, and research is needed to better understand the subtle ways in which ecosystems operate. Because of the differences in the forest conditions around the world in different climatic regions it is doubtful if a universal system for monitoring and verifying sustainable forest management will ever be possible, but it will be worth ensuring continued and deepening dialogue between the regions as represented by the various C&I schemes, to build a mutual acceptance of each other’s Indicators. Each of the schemes has ideas to offer the others and many measurement techniques will be applicable worldwide. Geographical Information System (GIS) is a powerful tool that is not mentioned in any of the Indicators, but can provide a very useful way of integrating the wide variety of information that is needed. The ATO scheme is the only one that mentions maps. While the measures needed to achieve sustainability are implemented at the Forest Management Unit level, there is a need to know that a country’s forests as a whole are being managed sustainably so that Certification can show consumers that they are not indirectly causing deforestation and forest degradation by squeezing the supply available for consumers in the producer countries. The FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment is the only overview of what is happening around the world’s forests, but with regard to the sustainability of forest management it only reports on the Criteria related to the enabling environment. ITTO (2011) and Forests Europe (2015) have published the State of Tropical Forest Management

15  Verification of Sustainability

and the State of Europe’s forests, respectively, which assess progress towards sustainable forest management in the 33 ITTO member countries and the 46 Forest Europe participating countries. The former focuses mainly on the enabling environment while the latter covers all the Indicators in the Pan-­European scheme, though data is far from complete. Both reports show that progress is being made. The ITTO report highlights the fact that the low value of forest compared with alternative uses for the land is a major problem for reducing deforestation. The low value is partly due to the relatively small proportion of commercially desirable species in the forests. The other main issue relates to land tenure and rights of access to the resource which is still a major problem in many tropical countries. While measures to ensure that timber products exported to Europe and the USA are sourced from sustainably managed forests has had some impact, many companies in the region are turning to less demanding markets that include the domestic market in most countries. While these various reports indicate that there is much greater awareness of the need to manage forest sustainably and that things are moving in the right direction, the lack of real quantitative indicators especially for ecosystem and environmental services means that it is impossible to know whether sustainability is being achieved. The difficulty is that it costs money to obtain useful data on the diversity of the biome and hydrological cycles, and few of the countries that are struggling to manage their forest well can afford to collect such data. In Europe this seems to have been partly overcome by the establishment of a network of sample plots across the continent that are monitoring some of the important variables.

Awareness Raising Among Politicians and the Public in General

The “Earth Summit” in 1992 drew public attention to many environmental issues, including climate change and deforestation. One outcome of that attention was the commitment of some funds to try to deal with the problems. Thirty years earlier, President Kennedy of the USA had committed the country to sending men to the moon and bringing them back safely and this had captured the public’s imagination and ensured the provision of adequate funding. Something similar is needed if the sustainable management of the world’s forests is to be achieved. Al Gore made the case for treating the possibility of climate change seriously with his Inconvenient Truth campaign. According to Burivolova et  al. (2018), who conducted an analysis of searches on Google for information relating to conservation and climate change, interest in the former has increased steadily since 2004 and the latter since 2007 following Al Gore’s campaign. Since access to Google is not the same in all countries around the world, these findings are mainly applicable to developed countries. My own experience in many developing countries is that there is quite widespread awareness of climate change, especially in rural communities which are noticing the effects on their farming activities. There is also quite serious concern about deforestation, which is widespread and has had a serious negative impact on many rural communities, but little understanding of what sustainable forest management means and

16

why it is desirable. In many countries, public opinion is neither sought by the decision makers nor listened to. Deforestation, and the sustainable management of forest are generally localised issues in most developed countries, with a few examples such as the Great Bear Rainforest in British Colombia in Canada which was the subject of a long running campaign to prevent the logging of old growth forest. In most developing countries the issue is much more related to land tenure and access to resources, which is often denied to local communities and is captured by the wealthy and powerful elite.

Developed Countries In most developed countries, land tenure is not an issue and the vast majority of forests are reasonably well managed, though not necessarily sustainably, so that activist campaigns are usually either about a very local issue, such as development in a nature reserve, or are concerned with more ethical issues such as deforestation at the global level. With many documentaries and news bulletins on television about wildlife, nature and rural affairs, awareness of the need for conservation is quite widespread, though it is doubtful if many people appreciate the complexity of achieving sustainability. It is also doubtful if people are aware that the consumption of wood products,

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even if certified as having come from sustainably managed forests, may have indirectly led to deforestation or forest degradation by reducing the supply available for the domestic market in the exporting country. Campaigns have been run to raise awareness of the impact of products such as palm oil, soybeans and beef on deforestation, but it is difficult to assess how effective they have been in persuading people to reduce their consumption of these and other similar products. As mentioned earlier, it is desirable that Certification and the European Voluntary Partnership Agreements and other similar schemes should refer to the overall situation in a country and not just to particular forests within countries. This is because “leakage” occurs when unrecorded or illegal logging that was taking place in a forest that has been certified is displaced to another forest or sometimes to another country that has not been certified. Sustainable forest management is not a technical issue that can be solved by foresters alone, because it needs political support and considerable funding as well as cooperation from the consuming public and other economic sectors such as agriculture, construction, fisheries, environment and energy. Conservationists have tended to adopt two strategies aimed at mobilising support for action related to global issues. The first of these has been directed at governments and big corporations to take action to tackle deforestation and the sustainable management of forest resources globally. Governments are influenced by a combination of lobbying and the production of reports to exert pressure internationally and to provide development aid. Big corporations are influenced through consumer pressure to adopt procurement policies that avoid products that contribute to deforestation and forest degradation. The formation of the Palm Oil Action Group is an example of the way civil society organisations operate and an outcome of their work was the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) formed in 2004 by many of the corporations involved in the industry. The second strategy adopted by activist groups is to engage with the public to try to influence

individual’s behaviour. This can be either to persuade people to change their lifestyle by reducing consumption, especially of products that contribute to deforestation, or to try to influence their purchasing power to put pressure on corporations to sell only products that have not had any negative environmental impact, such as causing deforestation. The introduction of certification has had some impact on consumers as people seem willing to pay a little extra for the peace of mind in knowing that they are not contributing to deforestation, though in the light of the comments in an earlier paragraph, this is questionable. The Great Bear Rainforest Campaign in British Colombia, Canada, is an example of both of these approaches. Gaworecki and Tomaselli (2018) describe how the campaign initially targeted the companies that were involved in the logging operations. This was only partially successful and did not result in any change in their behaviour, though it alerted them to the issue. The second stage of the campaign involved engaging with companies that purchased products from those involved in the logging through such tactics as disrupting shareholder meetings, boycotting products, media publicity and demonstrations at stores that sold the products. These activities finally brought the companies doing the logging to the negotiating table and the British Columbia Government became involved. This led to an interim agreement to limit logging in 2006 and a final agreement in 2016 that was enforced by law making further logging illegal. It was a long slog and illustrates the need for sustainable activism if sustainable development is to be achieved. “Scare tactics” that prey on people’s fear of the unknown by forecasting potential disasters in the future have frequently been used, but they are very controversial. Some claim that they can be effective if there is a deep personal connection between the target audience and the disaster being forecast. Someone who has experienced having their home flooded is more likely to be influenced by a campaign that forecasts more serious floods in the future unless some action is taken. Others claim that they are ineffective

Developed Countries

because people either don’t believe the forecasts or they ignore the threat because that is their way of coping with fear. Forecasts have generally been unreliable, though it is rare to see comments about past forecasts and whether they have actually been realised. Crompton and Kasser (2009) discuss at some length a third strategy that can be adopted in addition to the two discussed above. This strategy focuses on individual characteristics that define a person’s identity. It is based on psychological studies of human personalities and the different ways that individuals see themselves. Some people are ambitious, materialistic and concerned with money, possessions, achievement, power and status. The authors refer to evidence that indicates that such people are likely to have lifestyles that have negative consequences for the environment, such as excessive consumption of products that result in environmental damage. They are also less likely to respond to messages designed to protect ecology and the environment. Promoting ideas like Buy Green reinforces the desire to have possessions rather than the thought that people should reduce their consumption. Campaigns to protect the environment and promote sustainable forest management should place more emphasis on the intrinsic value and beauty of nature rather than trying to place monetary values on everything, which reduces the problem to a cost–benefit ratio. Another group of people experience difficulties in dealing with threats and fear, which can cause feelings of anxiety, guilt and reduced selfesteem. They employ a number of strategies to help them cope, which include indifference, diversion to think about other more pleasant things and re-interpretation to see the issue in a less threatening light. This may explain why fear campaigns often seem not to be very effective as this kind of person may ignore it, while the more materialistic type mentioned earlier may think it better to “make hay while the sun shines” if the threat is someway in the future. While sustainable forest management is both an environmental and a conservation issue it is a much more difficult concept to convey as in many ways it has little direct consequence for the vast

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majority of people. Even people who are directly involved in forestry such as members of Forest Europe and the Certification bodies have found it difficult to come up with a definition of Sustainable Forest Management that covers all the possibilities because it involves balancing mutually exclusive elements: more timber production means less biodiversity and dirtier water and vice versa. If people want more biodiversity and cleaner water, then they will have to have less timber products. Most developed countries have already destroyed much of their natural forest and are beginning to find ways of restoring forest cover, though mostly with plantations that have less biodiversity than natural forests. Some species have become totally extinct and others locally extinct. The loss of some species, especially predators like wolves that may have been hunted to extinction, has resulted in the growth of the population of other species such as deer that were their main prey and this upsets the natural balance. This has an impact on the forest regeneration due to browsing if the deer population grows unchecked. Increased agricultural productivity has meant that some marginal land is no longer used for agriculture and can be restored to forest. This then raises the question: in order to achieve sustainable forest management, should the rest of biodiversity be restored as well as the trees? Some species, such as birds and flying insects, may return if the habitat is more or less restored, but animals such as the wolf may be unable to migrate through a very man-made landscape with only fragmented areas of forest. In Scotland, the Eurasian Beaver (Castor fiber) was hunted to extinction in the sixteenth century, but a few individuals were introduced from Norway by a landowner sometime towards the end of the twentieth century. Some individual animals escaped and sightings of a “wild” population were recorded in 2006. A survey in 2012 identified a population estimated at 146 individuals spread through a large part of the River Tay catchment. A further survey by Campbell-Palmer et al. in 2018 estimated that the population had increased to 433 and begun to

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spread to neighbouring river catchments. In 2012 there was an “official” introduction organised jointly by a government agency and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland in Western Scotland. The species therefore seems to be thriving and spreading. However, not everyone is happy with the situation; farmers in particular are concerned about erosion of river banks causing local flooding and some areas becoming wetlands due to the damming of streams by the Beavers and no longer suitable for agriculture. It is difficult to balance nature with the needs of a modern society! Most people in developed countries that formerly had overseas colonies, such as Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, are unlikely to be aware that in the past, their country exploited the resources from their colonies to create some of the capital that enabled their economies to grow. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the British navy was experiencing shortages of oak for building and maintaining its ships and found that teak was a superior substitute. Various companies were set up to supply the navy and initially they exploited teak forests in Western India, and later in Burma. By the middle part of the century it was evident that the forests were being overexploited, and this subsequently led to the creation of the Burma Forest Service in 1856 and the Indian Forest Service in 1867 (Bryant 1997). These organisations set about surveying and protecting forests and regulating the felling of timber with the aim of achieving a sustainable supply. In doing this they came into conflict with the many companies that were making big profits from exploiting the teak forests. The Bombay-Burmah Company is an example. It acquired a monopoly on the logging of teak in Burma from the then King in 1863, which was extended by the British Indian Government after the king was deposed in 1885. The company subsequently extended its teak interests to Thailand and Java in Indonesia and expanded into tea plantations and other commodities. The story of the exploitation of Mahogany in Central and South America largely driven by demand for furniture in the USA and Europe follows a similar pattern (Anderson

2012), and also involves slavery. Thus degradation of tropical forests goes back a long way before most developing countries became independent. The message for politicians and the public in developed countries therefore needs to include the historical context, and explain  that some of the wealth that they enjoy today has come from exploitation of forests in what are currently developing countries. The continued consumption of tropical timbers is driving a process that was started almost two centuries ago, and nowadays leads to illegal logging and forest degradation. The difference between the historical and the current situation is the speed and scale of the process. Population and incomes are much higher now so that the pressure on the resources is higher, but perhaps of greater importance is the current use of very powerful heavy machinery, which enables huge areas to be logged in a very short time. Teak in Burma was harvested with the help of elephants (Plate 16.1) to drag the logs out of the forest so that the forest was exploited at a much slower rate and there was less damage to the soil. Much of the Mahogany was harvested using slave labour, rather like the kuda-kuda logging in swamp forests of Ramin today in Malaysia and Indonesia (Plate 16.2), which involves a team of eight men dragging logs along a track constructed from small trees laid out as two rails with cross members, on top of which the log slides. Politicians and the public in general must be made aware of the complexity of the problem, the consequences of not achieving a sustainable future for the world’s forests and the role that each must play in dealing with the problem. There are many activists and campaigning groups around the world that are doing important work in collecting and publishing data and monitoring what is going on in the field, but to some extent they are preaching to the converted. From time to time, an activist group publishes a report that catches the eye of the news media and it gets a few days publicity, but the attention span is short. There seems to be a fine balance to be struck between keeping an issue in the public attention and the public become bored.

Developing Countries

Plate 16.1  Elephant logging of Teak in Thailand

Plate 16.2  Kuda-kuda log extraction in swamp forest in Indonesia

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In the richer developed countries public interest and concern about various environmental issues, including deforestation, enables activist groups to raise money to pay for their campaigns and support the work that they do around the world.

Developing Countries Deforestation and forest degradation is nowadays mainly an issue in tropical developing countries. Politicians and foresters in developing countries understandably sometimes resent being lectured by people from developed countries on what they should or should not do with their forest resources. Being mostly poor, they need the revenue that can be generated from exploiting their natural resources to fund development and public services. Developed countries were often responsible in the past for exploiting forests and other natural resources in what were at the time overseas colonies, with little benefit for the local inhabitants. A strictly economic perspective would suggest that developing countries follow the same path as the developed countries and liquidate their forests and invest the proceeds in more financially beneficial activities. However, the situations are not quite comparable. Most developed countries are in the temperate environmental zone where forests have relatively few tree species and limited biodiversity, compared with tropical forests. In general, the soils in the temperate regions are relatively fertile so that permanent agriculture is possible and the need to clear forest is limited. In the tropics, most soils are acid and have low fertility so that sustained agriculture is not possible or very difficult and more forest has to be continually cleared. Although rainfall in some places within temperate regions may be similar to that in parts of the tropics the intensity of the rainfall is generally much lower. Tropical forests have much higher biological diversity so that the consequences of losing forest in the tropics are far higher than in temperate regions, and once the tropical forests are lost it will be impossible to restore them. Tropical forests are complex

ecosystems with a vast number of species, many occupying very special niches and with a high level of interdependency. Pollination and seed dispersal for some plants rely on one specific agent (animal or insect) and many animals and insects rely on a limited number of species for food or prey. Extinction of one species can lead to the extinction of many others that depend on it. Once species have become extinct the ecosystem cannot be restored. Humans who inhabit tropical regions and live in or near forests usually rely on the biodiversity for their survival with many species being food sources and others being used for utility purposes, such as gums, resins, fibres and thatching as well, of course as medicines. Although some forest is destroyed by small-­ scale farmers, these are often migrants from more overcrowded parts of their country and have little knowledge of the forest. Commercial operators working at a large scale destroy much more forest, and most of them are from cities and have little knowledge of, and no appreciation for, the value of the forest. A second difference already referred to above is the availability of chainsaws and heavy powerful machinery that enable huge areas of forest to be cleared easily and very rapidly, but also cause a lot of environmental damage in the process. The drivers of deforestation and forest degradation have been discussed earlier in Chap. 3. As discussed in Chaps. 9 and 10, domestic demand for wood products in many developing countries has grown steadily as they develop economically and populations grow, and this feeds back into pressure to log forests (often illegally). And demand for more food especially protein from livestock leads to pressure to clear more forest; public pressure for change can drive the political agenda. van der Ploeg et al. (2011) assessed the effectiveness of a Community Education and Public Awareness (CEPA) campaign to build public support for conservation of the Philippine crocodile. The campaign had run for 2 years and used a wide range of techniques to engage with and educate local communities. These involved three kinds of activities, namely: passive, active and

Target Audiences and Media Campaigns

interactive. The first included billboards, wall painting, posters, radio plugs, comic books and newsletters. The second had school presentations, cultural shows and puppet shows, and the third had community consultations and training workshops. The total cost of the campaign appears to have been around US$ 70,000 and it had an audience of 50,000–70,000 people and possibly more. A survey showed that it had been successful in raising awareness of the fact that crocodiles were a protected species and this was evident from the sharp drop in the number of crocodiles killed in the area. The billboards, wall paintings and posters proved to be the most effective means of getting the message across, while the radio plugs may have used the least effective channel, as it was a government channel that few people listened to. Using a channel that played pop music may have been more effective. The community consultations and training workshops were not evaluated. The former complemented the passive media, while the latter were directed at local government officials.

 arget Audiences and Media T Campaigns There are a very wide and diverse group of target audiences for awareness raising and education about the importance of conserving what is left of the natural tropical forest. It is important to identify these in order to select the most appropriate means to be used to reach out to them. There are perhaps seven priority target audiences that need to be reached in order to achieve sustainable forest management. In developing countries, there are three groups that are direct drivers of deforestation and forest degradation: (a) large agri-business and forestry corporations, (b) small (migrant) landless farmers and (c) forest dwelling or dependent communities. Then there are two groups that are indirect drivers of deforestation and forest degradation: (d) consumers of wood and forest products and (e) government officials and politicians that set policy, design laws and regulations and plan development. In developed countries there are

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two groups that are more or less the same as (d) and (e), but the message is slightly different. There are big questions as to who should organise campaigns to reach out to these audiences and how should campaigns be financed. At the moment it falls mainly to voluntary civil society organisations to raise money and organise campaigns and it is to be hoped that the public mainly in developed countries will continue to support such efforts, but it is doubtful if it will be enough. Many developed country governments provide financial development assistance to developing countries to promote sustainable forest management, though the sums seem small. According to the (OECD) the total overseas financial development assistance for forestry in 2016 was just US$ 607 million. There are 63 equatorial and subtropical developing countries that lost forest during the period 2010–2015, which have a total population of about 3.48 billion. Assuming that about 10% is in one of the first three target audiences indicated above that means about 350 million people or about 70 million households. Various estimates of the costs of Community Education and Public Awareness (CEPA) campaigns give an indicative cost of about US$ 2–3 per household, which is consistent with the figure quoted from van der Ploeg (op cit) above. A series of CEPA campaigns in each of the equatorial and subtropical countries that are still losing forest might therefore cost a total of about US$ 150–200 million annually for a 4 or 5 year period or longer if the experience of the Great Bear Rainforest campaign, cited earlier, is anything to go by. The 36 countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) can be considered as the main rich developed countries that import tropical timber products, and they have together a population of 1.28 billion people or around 35 million households. A CEPA campaign to alert consumers to the impact of their demand for tropical forest products might therefore cost around US$ 100 million annually for a 4–5 year period or longer. Campaigns directed at corporations, politicians and government officials would have

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smaller audiences, but may cost more per person because of the need to use more costly media, though nowadays social media are cheaper than television and newspapers and just as, if not more, effective. Campaigns in developing countries should be run by local organisations, but technical assistance to ensure that campaigns are well planned may be necessary together with substantial financial support from developed countries. Planning to make sure that the campaign uses an approach that is appropriate for the target audience is essential and needs a clear idea of the expected and hoped for impact and the eventual outcome. It is important that such campaigns are sustained until it is clear that the message has got through and the desired outcomes are being achieved. This requires regular monitoring to check on progress and an evaluation at the end to confirm that the planned outcome has been achieved. If monitoring at intervals during implementation indicates that the message is not getting through or is not having an impact, then a modification of the design may be needed. A logical Framework such as that shown in Table 16.1 can be very helpful in planning and monitoring. When the target audience includes Indigenous Peoples it is necessary to prepare material such as posters, pamphlets and notices in their language, and it is a good idea to involve members of such groups in the planning process to ensure that the message is conveyed in a meaningful form.

There is a wide range of different media that are currently used by various organisations. In the past few years social media have become a major vehicle for conveying information to a wide audience, especially among younger people. However access to the Internet is either very limited or not available in many rural communities in developing countries, but an app for mobile phones may be a good way to reach out to such communities as many now have mobile phones. Advertising by broadcasting over radio and television has not been totally replaced, and filming documentaries and printing pamphlets, posters and newsletters are still used but the costs are high and it is difficult to measure their effectiveness. In some countries there is a National Tree Planting Day, which can be a good way of raising awareness and support for forest conservation at a reasonably low cost, but they need to be well advertised and plenty of suitable planting stock needs to be ready. Stands at rural shows, markets and exhibitions also provide opportunities to reach out to a potentially receptive audience.

A Parting Shot Many walks of life have prestigious prizes to recognise outstanding achievement. There are the Nobel prizes for Peace, Science, Medicine and Economics, the Man Booker Prize for literature, Oscars, BAFTA and Golden Globes for film and

Table 16.1  A logical framework for planning a community education and public awareness campaign Design summary Impact

Performance targets/indicators Improved understanding of forests in target audience Outcome No more deforestation and forest degradation in Permanent Forest Estate Outputs Campaign in X villages, Y training sessions for village leaders, Z school visits Activities and milestones: Art contest billboard board games and cards Calendars T-shirts colouring books Community theatre murals newspaper articles Posters radio spots school visits Songs training sessions videos

Data sources reporting mechanisms Annual campaign evaluation report Annual campaign evaluation report Annual campaign evaluation report

Assumptions and risks Adequate incentives to change behaviour Alternative livelihoods for potential forest encroachers Cooperation from government to approach villages Inputs partners: Human resources Finance

A Parting Shot

television and prizes for Architecture but nothing so high profile for forestry. Achieving truly sustainable management of forests will be a difficult and challenging task and it would be a big incentive to forest managers around the world to have their efforts recognised internationally by the awarding of an annual prize to the managers of the forest that

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has shown the best progress or outstanding achievement towards sustainable management. The United Nations Forum on Forests should have access to sources of funding for such a prize, comparable in amount with the Nobel prizes, and it also has access to the expertise to seek candidates and judge the nominations.

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Conclusions

Key Conclusions Analytical Results • • The Sustainable Development Goal 15 has no specific target for how much forest should be sustainably managed by 2020 nor is there indication of the resources required (human and financial) or available to achieve the goals. • Increasing population pressure with the consequential increase in demand for more food and other natural resources is likely to remain, a major factor contributing to loss of forest. • The fragmentation of responsibility for forestry policy formulation and implementation between several Ministries, in many countries, whereby production is separated from conservation and wood industry is a serious drawback for achieving sustainability. • Many countries classify their forests according to function, which seems to be due more to institutional rather than logical considerations. Since forests provide multiple products and services, responsibilities for all the functions should be under one roof. • The annual forest degradation resulting from illegal and unrecorded log harvesting is in the region of 650–700 million m3 annually and may affect as much as 100–150 million ha. • Globally forests have reached a tipping point where the annual log harvest is more than the

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increment, which will result in an increasingly steep decline in increment from now on that will reduce the sustainable level of harvest in the future. The current consumption of industrial roundwood and fuelwood is likely to grow to about 6 billion m3 over the next 30 years, assuming that overall per capita consumption remains about the same as it is at present, with some decline in fuelwood consumption and an increase in industrial wood consumption. The threat is most serious in tropical forests, but is being driven in part by high demand for timber products in developed countries. The key to achieving sustainable forest management is ensuring that pressure to harvest logs from natural forest is reduced to sustainable levels and the supply of industrial roundwood and fuelwood needed to meet the likely future demand is met mainly from plantations. The current global forest resource is insufficient to sequester even the emissions from forests and forest land-use changes, let alone contribute to mitigating the impact of emissions from other parts of the global economy. The depletion of the commercial growing stock in many tropical and subtropical countries will reduce the sustainable future harvest and risks leading to an increase in illegal logging in Protected areas. Measures by the USA and the EU to ensure tropical timber imports are only from ­Certified

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Fraser, Achieving the Sustainable Management of Forests, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15839-2_17

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forests may have the perverse effect of causing illegal logging elsewhere in the producer countries through leakage. The value of timber is low compared with other commodities because the supply is more or less unlimited by unsustainable levels of harvest. The financial returns from most alternative land-uses that are driving forest clearance do not reflect externalities such as increased soil erosion, lost biodiversity, carbon emissions, the reduced source of supply of forest products and impact on the livelihoods of local communities and the landscape that result from the loss of the forest. The development of scenarios is a useful method for examining the trade-offs between alternative courses of action, as it helps opposing viewpoints on priorities to better understand the reasoning behind the opposition’s position. REDD+ investment in a timber exporting country that has illegal logging is compensating the country for failing to protect its forests and monitor and record properly what is going on. While the enabling environment is important in creating the conditions necessary to achieve sustainable forest management it’s the detail of how things are implemented in the field that will really determine the outcome. The lack of any threshold values and the use of words such as “appropriate” render many of the indicators more or less meaningless. The African Timber Organisation Criteria and Indicators are the most helpful, in that they focus mainly on what needs to be done at the Forest Management Unit level, which is the critical place for action. It is doubtful if people are aware that the consumption of wood products, even if certified as having come from sustainably managed forests, may have indirectly led to deforestation or forest degradation.

For Action • Plantation grown wood should be certified that it has come from well-managed planta-

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tions rather than from sustainably managed forest. To achieve truly sustainable management of forest there needs to be first and foremost a strong political will to do so and to put in place the necessary institutional framework. Since forests have multiple functions, responsibility for all functions (production and forest industry, environmental protection, biodiversity conservation and social welfare) should all be handled by a single institution. For sustainable forest management to be successfully implemented problems relating to prior occupation of the land need first to be addressed. It is not enough just to say that an area has been declared as a permanent forest, if the reality is that people are actually using some of the area. The volume of products from each cubic metre of log needs to be raised to the current best practice levels around the world, which will reduce the requirement for logs by 10–15%. All countries, whether producers or consumers, need to examine their supply and demand situation for timber products to determine whether they are currently in balance and are not overcutting their own forest or displacing deforestation to other countries. The public in the rich developed countries should not be misled by claims that a wood product has come from a sustainably managed forest, when a consequence of the importation is leakage that distorts the local market in the exporting countries, reduces the sustainable supply of logs and drives illegal logging. Where large export oriented companies have concessions part of the condition for VPA registration or Certification should be that they supply all local sawmills with certified logs from their concessions. Details of the harvest of non-timber forest products should be reported to each forest management unit so that the intensity of harvest per unit area of forest can be ascertained and monitored.

Overall Conclusions

• Simple low cost types of biodiversity surveys should be incorporated into all forest inventories. • Small areas with high conservation value within a wider forest area need to be recognised and given appropriate protection. • The market price of carbon dioxide will need to rise to somewhere in the range of US$ 40–80 per tonne, to make investing in forestry emission reductions and carbon sequestration commercially attractive. • The use of valuable tropical hardwoods for utility purposes should be limited and emphasis should be given to using them for veneer that can add value to composite products made from low quality species. • Balancing the sustainable supply of logs and imported timber products with the total demand for logs, including exports within a country, will greatly reduce the incentive to log illegally, it may mean closing down some industry in the short term. • Eliminating illegal logging requires a multi-­ faceted approach that includes plantations to increase the sustainable supply of legitimate raw material, improved law enforcement and stronger penalties for infractions, balancing sustainable supplies with total demand nationally and improved real-time monitoring with the use of UAVs (drones) and airships. • Biomass fuel should be accompanied by a third party awarded certificate to guarantee that there is a replacement crop that will sequester all the carbon emitted from its combustion. • Decisions regarding applications for conversion of forest to other land-uses should be based on an environmental impact assessment. A Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis facilitated with a Geographical Information System is a useful tool for ranking alternative land-use options for forests. • Large corporations and investors who want to clear forests for an alternative use should be required to assess the carbon stock, the biodiversity and the non-timber forest products on the land they propose to clear and pay for it at

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the prevailing market price of the carbon and other products. Ecotourism developers should be licensed or certified to ensure that operators are properly trained and equipped and understand the ecological and environmental impact of their activities. Countries that do not yet have a Permanent Forest Estate need to designate it urgently and organise it into viable Forest Management Units. As far as possible, the boundaries of Forest Management Units should follow natural boundaries or clearly defined man-made boundaries. A priority must be to secure all the remaining primary forest and designate it all as Permanent forest (1.23 billion ha). It would be a big incentive to forest managers around the world to have their efforts recognised internationally by the awarding of an annual prize for the most sustainably managed forest.

Overall Conclusions Chapter 1 The two indicators that have been set for assessing progress towards achieving the forestry related targets of Sustainable Development Goal 15 are “the forest area as a proportion of a country’s land area”, and “progress towards sustainable forest management”, but both are rather meaningless. There is no optimum proportion of land area that should be forest and sustainable forest management is not dependent on how much forest a country has. The forest area can change as a result of many possible events: the area of prime natural forest could decrease and be replaced with plantations, for example, while the total area of forest is unchanged. For the second indicator, it will be difficult to judge if progress has been made, as the only baseline information that will be available is the FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment of 2015. This will only indicate what additional instruments needed to

17 Conclusions

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support sustainable forest management have been implemented.

Chapter 2 A significant proportion of the forest area that has been certified to date is plantation forest and it is doubtful if it should really be included as sustainably managed forest as they provide few of the environmental services and when harvested may even have a negative impact on the environment, for a while at least. Certifying that wood has come from well-managed plantations rather than from sustainably managed forest would be more to the point.

Chapter 3 Total forest area globally decreased by 16 million ha between 2010 and 2015. However that is the net loss. A more important indicator is the loss of 38.8 million ha in 77 countries of which about 22 million ha are in the “Equatorial” zone, while 71 countries gained a total of 22.8 million ha of which about 15.4 million ha are new plantations. Increasing population pressure with the consequential increase in demand for more food and other natural resources has been, and is likely to remain, a major factor contributing to loss of forest. However, it may be possible for the trend to be reversed as a result of improved agricultural productivity, industrialisation and urbanisation, but questions need to be asked as to how much of the change in Europe is due to displacement of demand for food and other crops such as palm oil, to other parts of the world. Increasing agricultural productivity will require a number of things to happen including some consolidation of land holdings into fewer larger units, increased mechanisation, increased inputs of energy and fertiliser, improved genetic material (both livestock and crops), alternative employment opportunities for those who leave the land and better training for those who continue to farm. Such measures will require enormous investment, which is usually in short supply

in developing countries. Without progress along these lines it will be increasingly difficult to establish and maintain stability in forest areas that is a pre-requisite for sustainable management. Many of the small subsistence farmers that encroach into forests are very poor and do not have the financial resources to increase their inputs and raise productivity. Once Primary forest is lost, especially in the tropics and temperate rainforests, it is almost impossible to replace it at a bearable cost. Analysis of the 2015 Global Forest Resource Assessment has shown that there are many inconsistencies in the data. However, analysis indicates that the volume of logs harvested illegally may be as much as 650 million m3 annually. This has a serious negative impact on long-term sustainability. A more useful indicator of sustainability would be the number of countries that have succeeded in eliminating illegal logging. The only real indicator currently available for monitoring sustainability of forest management is the “Certification” system operated by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) both of which are primarily aimed at production forests and suffer from the problem of “Leakage” as illegal logs are sought from non-certified forests. It is likely to be difficult to greatly increase the areas of tropical forests that are Certified until the total demand in each country for domestic and export markets can be balanced with the long-term sustainable supply. It is clear that very substantial financial resources will be needed to achieve sustainability, part of which are needed for capacity building, especially in many tropical developing countries.

Chapter 4 Foresters need to develop alliances with other sectors that stand to benefit from sustainably managed forests. Agriculture will benefit from less soil erosion and therefore higher productiv-

Overall Conclusions

ity if forest cover is maintained on critical sites, especially steep slopes, river banks and unstable ground that may be prone to landslides. The fishery sector, both inland in rivers and lakes and in coastal waters where fish farming may be practised, can benefit from less suspended solids in the water from erosion as well as from shade and nutrients from trees on river banks and lakeshores. The transport and energy sectors can benefit from the sequestration of carbon by trees to offset emissions that may be hard to reduce in the short-term and small roadside woodlands and even larger forest blocks can offer an attractive environment for service facilities. Various surveys of public opinion show that raising awareness of forestry issues is vital both to ensure informed public attitudes towards the management of forests and also to understand feelings in all sections of the population about forests that can be taken into account in forest management planning. They also show that consultation with a few “representative” groups will not be enough to ensure support for achieving the necessary trade-offs between the short- and long-­ term considerations. Care needs to be exercised to ensure that vocal activists do not make the agenda that does not have the support of the “silent majority”. Developing the “Political Will” to take the necessary action to achieve sustainable management of forests needs a much wider and more vocal expression of public attitude. Most countries have policies with well-­ meaning statements about preventing illegal logging and deforestation, but none seem to have achieved success so that it must be concluded that it is the implementation of policy and the enforcement of forest and other Laws that is at the root of the problem. Many countries classify their forests according to function, which seems to be due more to institutional rather than logical considerations. Forest Departments are often organised with sub-­ units related to the major functions of forests such as production, protection and conservation. In some countries responsibilities for these different functions are placed under different Ministries. Since forests provide multiple prod-

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ucts and services responsibilities for all the functions should be under one roof. Thus it is better to have a forestry agency that is primarily concerned with policy, resource allocation and compliance and has a more territorial based rather than functional based organisation with specialist support services such as planning, inventory and mapping, research and public relations. The appropriate place to decide the optimal way of managing an area of forest is at the Management Unit level where management plans can be drawn up to determine which areas are of High Conservation Value, which areas need to be kept intact to protect soil and water and which areas can be logged without undue negative environmental impact. If the forest function is decided at the national level and laid out on small-scale maps it will result in very inefficient use of the nation’s forest resources. There may be important biodiversity “hot spots” in areas classified for production and areas that could be harvested safely within forest areas set aside for soil and water conservation. To achieve truly sustainable management of forest there needs to be first and foremost a strong political will to do so and to put in place the necessary institutional framework. This includes both the structure of an organisation dedicated to managing and protecting the forests as well as providing it with the necessary instruments (policy, legal, financial and technical) to be effective. There also needs to be widespread consultation among stakeholders in formulating a strong and clear forest policy so that it has the fullest possible support. The policy needs to be well publicised especially among rural communities whose needs must be respected and incorporated into the policy. Clear rules need to be established and enforced to specify the special circumstances under which other sectors (e.g. agriculture, construction, energy, etc.) may take precedence over the needs of the forestry sector; it should not be looked upon as the reservoir of land for other purposes. This may require recognition that some forest may have to be lost but such decisions should take into account the environmental, ecological

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and social impact of losing the forest and aim to define areas for conversion on the basis of minimising the various impacts. There are three important questions relating to the Payments for Environmental/Ecological Services. The first is—How to determine that the services being paid for are actually being provided? Payments are usually based on input activities rather than outputs or impacts. The second is—Are the appropriate people receiving the payments? It tends to be the wealthier and better educated who capture the payments although the poorer and less well educated may of necessity be contributing more to the problem and are more in need of some financial support. The third is— Does the impact of the payments bring benefits that are commensurate with the level of payment? The payor can reasonably expect that costs are reduced or income is increased by an amount similar to that which is being paid for the service.

Chapter 5 Examples have been quoted to show how a dedicated body with a clear mandate can get things done, and so achieving sustainable forest management requires a similar approach. The fragmentation of responsibility for forestry between several Ministries, in many countries, whereby production is separated from conservation and industry is a serious drawback for achieving sustainability. Sustainable forest management requires a holistic approach to ensure that conservation issues are given due regard in production forest areas and the development of wood processing industry is balanced with the sustainable supply. This is why having a single dedicated agency with responsibility for all aspects of forestry together in one body is required. A further advantage of having responsibility for forest production, environmental protection and conservation within one authority is that an appropriate and efficient balance can be struck between the various functions within the country’s forest estate rather than setting aside specific areas for specific functions to the exclusion

17 Conclusions

of the others. Also recreation and leisure and landscape considerations overlap with each of the three major functions and are likely to be neglected if responsibility for them is spread between different arms of government. With a unified structure the staff employed by the organisation can get experience in all aspects of forestry management rather than having experience limited to just one primary function. For sustainable forest management to be successfully implemented problems relating to prior occupation of the land need to be addressed first. It is not enough just to say that an area has been declared as a permanent forest, if the reality is that people are actually using some of the area. The options are twofold, either negotiate with the people concerned to agree which land can be considered as their land and excise it from the proposed permanent forest or negotiate compensation for giving up the land and resettle the community elsewhere. The key lesson from the Doi Tung experience, which is now being copied in a number of other countries, is that engagement with communities living within protected areas can successfully prevent further deforestation and in fact increase forest cover while improving community livelihoods. The support needs to be sustained over many years, much longer than most donor project cycles. Most development projects have a life of 5–7 years, which is generally not long enough for the benefit of the changes to become fully established. If government supports the establishment of farmers’ forestry associations, allocating forest to individual farmers can be made conditional on joining an association. The law can be modified to make felling of trees illegal unless the owner either has a license or the felling is part of an approved management plan. Forest Farmers Associations can help farmers to comply with such conditions and can help to ensure that the farmers benefit from owning the forest through technical support with activities such as ­preparing management plans and timber marketing. Associations are in a position to broker such activities among groups of members to reduce costs and increase revenue.

Overall Conclusions

Data on employment in forestry from the Global Forest Resource Assessment shows clearly that countries that have lost growing stock or forest area employ far fewer people than the countries that have gained growing stock over the period 2010–2015. Education and training are vital components of the technical instruments that are needed to support sustainable forest management. Education ranges from the professional and sub-professional levels for those who wish to follow a career in the sector in either public service or working for a company involved in the sector, to education of the public about the importance of forests to their future wellbeing. The first depends on good quality teaching institutions.

Chapter 6 Sorting out land tenure is vital to achieving sustainable management of forest, because until it is sorted the forest will continue to act as the land bank to meet the growing demand for food and other agricultural commodities. Because of the complexity of the issue there is no silver bullet to resolve it, but it needs to be solved to deal with poverty, food security and to enable forests to be managed sustainably. Experience is growing around the world that indicates that community forest management if supported with technical assistance to build the capacity of the community institutions can be very successful in reducing and even reversing deforestation as well as providing the communities with alternative employment and income sources. Community mapping is a good starting point for involving communities and building knowledge and understanding about forest management. It can help in identifying the role that forests play in the community economy and ensure that there is full participation by the community in any outside led initiative. Simple and low cost types of biodiversity surveys involving communities apart from providing valuable baseline data can also help communities to understand the need for sustainability. They should be incorporated into all forest inventories.

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As the Doi Tung project shows, diversifying the rural economy and improving livelihoods of small farmers and shifting cultivators can be a successful approach for dealing with communities that have encroached into forest that is to be protected. It also shows that engagement with such communities has to be sustained for a long period until the community economy is strong enough to survive and grow without outside support.

Chapter 7 The risk of species extinction increases with decreasing fragment size. A decrease in the size of forest fragments is associated with a loss of species but the rate of loss is far greater in the patches where there has been a reduction in crown closure. Fragmentation together with degradation is the most serious threat to species extinction. Plants and animals vary in their need for, and use of territory. Large, solitary animals need to roam over huge areas to find enough prey to survive, while others are gregarious and live in groups and may be able to survive in a relatively small area. Trees and plant species also vary in the way they are distributed with some species being widely dispersed and others clumped in groups. Large animals that require a big territory to survive are the most at risk of extinction as a result of forest fragmentation. However most forest dwelling species are at risk when the forest becomes very fragmented because there is a Minimum Viable Population of any species that is needed in order to survive. The larger the animal, the bigger is the Home Range, with large animals covering as much as 300 km2. Carnivorous species have slightly larger home ranges in relation to their body weight than herbivores. This has large implications for the management of forest in the landscape, as excessive fragmentation will reduce the available space for large forest dwelling animals. It also ­highlights the value of well-designed corridors if they effectively increase the habitat area by connecting two areas with the same habitat.

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Much of the remaining stock of large sized trees appears to be in Protected areas and may be under threat from illegal logging. This is certainly the case in a number of equatorial countries where illegal logging can be observed in many Protected areas. This poses a real challenge to governments and forest services, especially in equatorial countries to ensure that Protected areas are respected. In order to be able to monitor changes (positive or negative) in the biodiversity of a management unit, whether it be a Production forest unit or a Protected area, it is essential to have a baseline assessment of the biodiversity. Community biodiversity surveys and annual biodiversity surveys carried out by volunteers and property owners are important. Useful sources of information on how to organise biodiversity surveys and recognised methods for trapping animals are available (see Chap. 8). Such relatively simple and low cost types of biodiversity surveys should be incorporated into all forest inventories. However, both natural and plantation forests that have timber production as the main object of management can play an important role in helping to conserve biodiversity which will benefit from the use of such measures as low impact logging and the recognition of small areas with high conservation value within a wider forest area.

Chapter 8 The consequences of erosion are not only the loss of soil and nutrients from the place where it is occurring, but also increased loads of sediments in rivers, which can affect fish stocks and deposition in lakes and reservoirs for hydro-power generation, irrigation and water supply for human or industrial consumption. These latter can result in high costs due to the reduction in the operational life of dams, wear and tear on turbine blades in electricity power plants and additional cleaning and purification costs for water treatment plants. The build-up of nutrients in rivers and lakes can have knock-on effects on the growth of algae and other aquatic plants, which may be harmful to fish stocks.

It is clear from the FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment that the current forest resource is insufficient to sequester even the emissions from forests and forest land-use changes, let alone contribute to mitigating the impact of emissions from other parts of the global economy. However the difference is not great and if deforestation and forest degradation could be halted and the area of plantations increased even modestly it would appear that forests could make an important contribution to stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The market price of carbon dioxide will need to rise to somewhere in the range of US$ 40–80 per tonne, by 2020, before it will become consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement. At those levels investing in forestry emission reductions and carbon sequestration will become more commercially attractive.

Chapter 9 The unsustainable harvesting of logs is usually driven by the wood processing industry expanding its capacity, and hence demand for logs, more than can be supplied sustainably from the forests in the country. The additional demand is then either met by illegal logging in the country concerned or by importing logs, which may be logged illegally in another country. Achieving long-term sustainability for the supply of timber and wood products requires that the capacity of industrial plantations and those natural forests that are managed primarily for timber production are in balance with expected future demand. The current consumption of industrial roundwood is likely to grow to about 6 billion m3 over the next 30 years, assuming that per capita consumption remains about the same as it is at present. The actual volume will depend to some extent on the level of product recovery from the logs. If the volume of products from each cubic metre of log is raised to the current best practice levels around the world the requirement for logs could be reduced by 10–15%. At present the recovery of product in most developing countries is about a half of that in the best of the developed

Overall Conclusions

countries. As a result, even when all the processing is done in the producer country, it only captures about one-third of the value that is added from log to final producer. The consumer countries captures a high proportion because VAT, wholesale and retail mark-ups and profits are based on the import price of the product, which is much higher than the log price. The temperate production forests are just about being managed for a sustainable harvest of logs, but the tropical and subtropical countries are depleting their growing stock of commercial logs, and the rate of depletion will accelerate in the future. Any further reduction in the growing stock density in the natural production forests will reduce the increment in the future and hence the potential future harvest. A likely outcome if this happens would be for an increase in illegal logging in Protected areas. This shows that to stand any chance of achieving sustainable management of forests, deforestation and further degradation of the remaining natural forests must stop immediately. The area of plantations must continue to be expanded at least at the current rate. The key to achieving sustainable forest management is ensuring that pressure to harvest logs from natural forest is reduced to sustainable levels and the supply of industrial roundwood and fuelwood needed to meet the likely future demand is met mainly from plantations. If the permanent production forest estate, including plantations, cannot meet the demand on a sustainable basis, then the protected areas will not be safe and forest degradation will continue as removals by logging exceed the growth capacity of the forest. Habitats will continue to be destroyed and soil erosion and flash flooding will increase. Action is needed to resolve the situation. At the country level this could involve closing some wood processing industries, importing either raw material or finished products, improving the efficiency of the wood processing industry to reduce the amount of raw material needed, perhaps by raising royalties on logs harvested, or a combination of all these measures. All countries, whether producers or consumers, need to examine the supply and the demand

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situation for timber products to determine whether they are currently in balance. An essential first step is to determine domestic final demand for all products, covering construction, the furniture and other wood manufacturing, agriculture and other possible uses such as railway sleepers and pit props. Paper is the end-use for pulp and in those countries with either pulp or paper manufacturing, or both it is necessary to do an overall balance for the two combined that includes imports and exports of both groups of product as well as recycled paper and non-wood pulp fibre. The final demand then needs to be compared with the processing industry capacity and the output of products, which should include all small-scale operators as well as large ones. If the country exports logs or products, these must be included on the demand side. All data should be expressed as roundwood equivalent using locally appropriate conversion factors. The supply side needs to include all the sources of wood raw material from different forest types, plantations and if appropriate, imports of both raw material and products. The log harvest from domestic sources should be based on sustainable levels rather than the actual levels, if there is any question that forest degradation is occurring. Aggregating and comparing both sides will reveal whether there is a sufficient surplus that could be available for export or a deficit that will need to be met from imports, and may be met currently by illegally harvested logs. It then becomes an economic and political question as to whether some exporting is justified in terms of foreign exchange earnings or employment if there is a net benefit after deducting the cost of imports that will be needed to maintain the balance. It is very important to maintain a balance that is consistent with the sustainable supply of logs from the country’s forests, rather than to assume that the price of logs and products will adjust to maintain a balance if the supply available for the domestic market is constrained. As can be seen in many countries it is illegal logging and an unsustainable supply that maintains the balance rather than the price. Veneers are the most valuable product made from tropical timbers, especially when looked at

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in terms of the volume of log required per cubic metre of product. Logs utilised for veneer and plywood are worth almost three times as much as sawlogs. Most tropical hardwoods are sought after for special properties such as their durability, colour, figure and hardness that make them especially valuable for uses such as furniture, panelling and parquet flooring. It makes no sense to saw such fine hardwoods for utility end-uses, and even worse to use them for block board and other panel products. The latter should be made from plantation timber. The volume of tropical hardwoods harvested annually needs to be reduced steadily and replaced with plantation grown timber. Many countries have shown that plantation grown Teak, Acacia and Rubber wood (Hevea) can be used for many purposes for which old growth hardwoods are used. The use of the latter needs to be restricted to products such as veneers and high class furniture that reflect their increasing scarcity. Wood-based panels and other composite products and pulp need to be made mainly from either plantation wood or residues and possibly branchwood from selective felling of trees in natural production forest areas. Inventories of production forest need to be carried out in order to assess the sustainable yield of valuable species so that the industry can adapt the way it utilises species for different purposes. The Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade programme promoted by the European Union is an important contribution towards more sustainable forest management, but it mainly addresses the large export oriented companies for whom selling to the European market is important, especially in view of its size. It does not address the issue of overexploitation of the resource for the domestic market in the exporting countries, which is a major driver of illegal logging. It is misleading to the public in the rich developed countries to claim that a wood product has come from a sustainably managed forest, when a consequence of the importation is leakage that distorts the local market and reduces the sustainable supply of logs in the exporting countries. This encourages small operators to log illegally

17 Conclusions

in order to get cheap logs to meet the domestic demand. Importers of wood products from developed countries need to take a more holistic view of the situation in the producing countries in order to ensure that all forest in the country is being managed sustainably and not just the forest areas from which their products originate. Investing in small local sawmills in developing producer countries in both equipment and training to enable them to increase substantially their efficiency in the use of raw materials would be a good step towards achieving sustainability of the forest resource. The training should also include health and safety issues, as these are often abysmal. Where large export oriented companies have concessions part of the condition for VPA registration or Certification should be that they supply all local sawmills with certified logs from their concessions. This will ensure that the domestic market is also using wood products from sustainably managed forests and it will reduce the amount of wood available for export. This will help to increase prices and so offset some or all of the costs of meeting the needs of the domestic market. The 58 countries that have pulping and wood-­ based panel sub-sectors need to do more to ensure that their raw material comes from plantations and not natural forest. Twenty of the developing countries appear to have a deficit of about 62 million m3 of raw material (Table 9.4). There also appears to be a very large deficit in small roundwood in East Asia and North America amounting to a total of 265 million m3 annually. About 50 million ha of additional commercial plantations are urgently needed in various tropical developing countries in order to just meet the deficit for small roundwood for pulp and panels and a similar area is needed to reduce the pressure on the natural forest so that harvesting can be reduced to sustainable levels. Hundred million ha of plantations will require about US$ 100 billion, but it is not a large area in relation to the area of natural tropical forest that can be put onto a sustainable path for the future. The sustainability of non-timber forest products from natural forests that are managed for

Overall Conclusions

timber production is dependent on the measures adopted for overall management of the forest. As with timber, a baseline inventory is required in order to assess the sustainable level of harvest, which needs to be planned and managed on a rotational basis around the whole forest management unit. It is probably best to organise harvesting of any non-timber forest products in areas scheduled for logging, but before the logging takes place. This will facilitate access and monitoring and ensure that the non-timber forest products are harvested before the logging disturbs the forest. Details of the harvest of non-timber forest products should be reported for each forest management unit so that the intensity of harvest per unit area of forest can be ascertained.

Chapter 10 Achieving a balance between the sustainable supply of logs and imported timber products and the total demand for logs including exports of logs and timber products within a country will greatly reduce the incentive to log illegally. It may mean closing down some industry in the short term and investment in plantations that will take some years to have a positive impact. Wood processing facilities should be licensed and a condition of a license should be that there is adequate raw material available on a sustainable basis. Pulpmills, for example, should not be constructed until there are adequate plantations available, preferably established on bare land, to meet their requirements, even if this means substantial investment several years ahead of the mill becoming operational. This will not be popular with pulp and paper companies, but it will avoid the temptation to rely on clearing existing forest. The European Timber Regulation and the Lacey Act in the USA have been effective in raising awareness of the importance of avoiding illegally felled timber, but they may have had the perverse effect of increasing illegal logging in the producer countries. This is because facilitating export of timber products deprives the domestic market of those same products. If the exports are

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using a high proportion of the sustainable supply the demand in the domestic market may then have to be made from illegally felled logs. Putting an end to illegal logging requires laws to be strengthened and for it to be made a criminal offence. This will also need staff training, improved investigative capacity and a strengthened judicial system with stronger penalties for law-breakers. Measures to improve law enforcement will increase the risks considerably for those engaged in the illegal activities but do not address the financial incentive to steal logs. Imposing requirements for Low Impact Logging and Certification on legitimate operators is fine, but it has the effect of increasing their costs, which pushes up the price of legitimate logs. This in turn has the effect of increasing the profit for the illegal loggers who can keep their harvesting costs to a minimum and do not bother with Certification or other ethical issues such as staff welfare and health and safety. They do however usually incur additional costs for bribery. In order to combat illegal logging it is essential to get real-time information on where and when it is taking place. Satellite imagery can be useful in detecting where it is taking place but the chances of capturing images while it is going on are low. An alternative or possibly complementary technology is to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) commonly referred to as drones. The technology has advanced rapidly in recent years and drones are readily available at a modest price.

Chapter 11 Forests generally have a much lower direct value than most of the alternative land-uses that drive forest clearance. This is largely due to the relatively low value of timber compared with most other commodities, which is in part due to the relative abundance of trees that can be harvested on an unsustainable basis. The sustainable yield from most natural tropical forests of commercially desirable species and sizes is quite low but a large growing stock needs to be maintained to achieve the growth rates needed to sustain the

17 Conclusions

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supply in the long term. Volume growth is only 1–2% of the total growing stock volume. Unfortunately, the financial returns from most alternative land-uses that are driving forest clearance do not reflect externalities such as the cost of increased soil erosion, lost biodiversity, carbon emissions, the reduced source of supply for timber and non-timber forest products and impact on the livelihoods of local communities and the landscape that result from the loss of the forest. The relatively low value of timber also has an impact on the attractiveness of investing in plantations to deal with the problems of increasing demand for forest products and illegal logging. The paradox is that increasing the supply of logs to offset the lost production potential from cleared forests by expanding the area of plantations will tend to keep log prices low until either illegal logging can be eliminated or there is no more forest left to be logged illegally. Only when the supply of logs can be controlled to a sustainable level will log prices begin to rise and so give an incentive to industry and the population at large to use the resource more efficiently and establish enough new plantations to meet growth in demand without destroying any more natural forest. There is a grave risk that much of the valuable tropical forest will be lost before this happens. For sustainable forest management, Low Impact Logging must be applied but it affects the relationship between costs, revenues and volume harvested. There is a higher initial fixed cost due to the additional survey work required, but a slightly lower variable cost as time is saved in the extraction due to better planning. With selective logging in tropical forests this has the effect of raising the volume harvested that gives the maximum profitability by about 10% compared with conventional logging, which is generally higher than the optimum from a silvicultural and sustainability point of view. Where Forest Management Units already exist, a detailed inventory of the whole unit will determine the sustainable level of harvest, taking due consideration of the ecological and environmental issues such as setting aside areas of High Conservation Value and riparian forest. Where

they do not exist, a first step towards sustainable forest management will be to establish them. Rather than giving concessions it is preferable to invite proposals from reputable companies to manage the unit for a reasonable period such as 20  years with the selected company being (in principle) the one that offers the highest annual rent for the unit. The combined deficit for pulpwood logs and sawlogs is about 305 million m3, which needs to be addressed urgently if the continued loss of forest is to be halted. Unfortunately the largest proportion of the deficit is in sawlogs and veneer logs, which take the longest time to produce in plantations, and is probably why so much primary and logged over tropical forest is being logged illegally. If the overall industry recovery factor for the conversion of tropical logs to products was increased to 50% from the current 43%, it would reduce the apparent deficit in logs that is probably being met at present by illegal logging by about 116 million m3, which would be a lot cheaper than establishing enough plantations to produce the same amount of raw material. About 8–10 million ha of new plantations would be needed to reduce the deficit by that amount and it would take 15–30 years to achieve at a cost of at least US$ 8–15 billion.

Chapter 12 Valuing forests for the environmental and ecological services that they provide is a difficult process. Clearly an area of forest in one place within a country will have different values from forest in other places, according to the local conditions and depending on which services are being provided and how important these services are locally. Similarly there are differences between countries. Some of the services such as carbon capture and storage and ecotourism can be marketed, so can have a financial value, while others such as watershed protection and biodiversity conservation are not. There are a large number of environmental factors where forests play a crucial role in miti-

Overall Conclusions

gating the impact of extreme conditions. However, the role of forests and hence their value to mankind is very site specific. The principal environmental factors where forests may play a role are rainfall, wind, temperature and sunlight and forests can provide protection from extremes of these factors for humans and their crops, livestock and property, soils, the coastline and wild plants, animals and fish. The relationship between forest cover and areas liable to be flooded may be determined empirically in specific locations, if suitable data is available. The area at risk of being flooded will depend on topographic and climatic factors, and the cost of damage depends on the way in which the population uses the areas that are flood prone. In seeking to achieve sustainable forest management consideration must be given at the Management Unit level to the local importance of mitigating flood damage. The magnitude of the nutrient losses depends to a large extent on the amount of nutrients that are in the soil naturally as well as the factors that determine the amount of erosion that is likely to occur. It is well known that the fallow period when secondary forest regrows after shifting cultivation restores the fertility of the soil and will normally occur naturally, unless the site has been so heavily degraded that it has been taken over by grasses or bamboo. Decisions regarding the role of forests in reducing the risk of soil erosion and nutrient loss and in restoring degraded land need to be taken at the local Management Unit level where all the factors that determine an outcome can be assessed. Wind can be troublesome inland as well as on the coast, and trees and forests can provide useful shelter both for human settlements and for livestock. Plantations can be established as shelterbelts, and depending on the species of trees that are planted and the width of the belt, can also provide some timber and promote biodiversity. Mention has been made earlier of the value of biodiversity corridors to connect fragmented areas of woodland, and these can also perform a useful function in providing shelter for crops and livestock.

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Decisions regarding applications for conversion of forest to other land-uses should be based on the environmental impact assessment. A Spatial Multi-Criteria Analysis facilitated by a Geographical Information System is a useful tool for ranking alternative land-use options for forests. Areas that should remain as forest because they are providing important ecological, environmental or social services may be ranked highly and will be delineated first and the area best suited to the proposed alternative land-use will be directed onto areas where the forest services are less important. If these areas are unsuitable for the particular alternative land-use, for whatever reason, then either the change in land-use is rejected or it may be possible to reach a compromise by allowing the conversion of some of the forest where the benefits are marginal. One of the criteria for the alternative land-use should be its sustainability and productivity, to avoid clearing more forest than necessary. Biomass fuel should be supported with a third party awarded certificate to guarantee that there is a replacement crop that will sequester all the carbon emitted from its combustion. When ecotourism is to be developed there should be some kind of licensing or certification scheme so that only properly trained and equipped operators are allowed to offer ecotourism services. Ecotourism is not just a source of income for the forest, but is also a means of providing an incentive to local communities to conserve and protect their forests. Increasing demand for ecotourism is to be welcomed, as it will help to raise awareness of the consequences of further destruction of natural forest and bring pressure to bear on politicians to do something about it. However, if it results in increased pressure on the existing ecotourism “hot spots” it could have negative consequences for their sustainability. The impact of the existing and new ecotourism facilities needs to be carefully planned and monitored to ensure that their sustainability is not being threatened by overexploitation and perhaps in some situations limits on the number of people visiting sites at any one time need to be established. Management plans for Forest Management

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Units should consider whether any scope exists for developing ecotourism or recreational facilities within the unit. If it is considered appropriate to develop facilities for public access, then measures need to be considered and adopted for visitor management. Airships could be a good way of providing access to remote national parks and other Protected areas, to avoid the need to construct roads, as they would provide ecotourists with good views of the forest and management with a good means for patrolling the area.

Chapter 13 The first step in implementing sustainable forest management is to delineate a Permanent Forest Estate. Where most forests are in public ownership a top-down approach is often used to set out in broad terms at the national level which forest is to be incorporated into the Permanent Forest Estate. For privately owned forests it is up to the individual property to decide, though in some countries the law prohibits or restricts property owners from clearing any existing forest. There is no hard and fast rule as to how much forest a country should have but it should be based on a rational assessment of the future needs of the country in terms of the quality of the environment, the conservation of its natural heritage, its likely future needs for timber and other forest products and the need for land primarily for agriculture, but also for infrastructure, mining, housing and industry. An example of a participatory approach to establishing the future size and direction of forest resources is the Forest and Timber Inquiry in Australia. The inquiry conducted by the Resource Assessment Commission looked at the Forest and undertook widespread public consultation as well as detailed discussions with stakeholders, including indigenous people, environmental activists, the timber industry and groups involved in using the forest resources for various purposes such as recreation and leisure. It also reviewed research findings and relevant literature and commissioned some independent research studies.

17 Conclusions

The development of scenarios is a useful method for examining the trade-offs between alternative courses of action, as it helps opposing viewpoints on priorities to better understand the reasoning behind the opposition’s position. It will not be possible to please everybody, but if a compromise can be reached that satisfies the majority, progress can be made. Having defined a Permanent Forest Estate in broad terms it is necessary to divide it into Forest Management Units. For natural forest areas this is best done with local knowledge and may be delegated to local or regional branches of the forest authority who should be aware of existing local communities that are living within or adjacent to areas identified at the national level. As far as possible, the boundaries of Forest Management Units should follow natural boundaries such as rivers and ridges or clearly defined man-made boundaries such as roads or registered property boundaries. It is an expensive business surveying and marking boundaries in the field and much money has been wasted in developing countries in marking boundaries that have subsequently been ignored by either land speculators or local communities. One of the main reasons that boundaries are ignored is lack of consultation with local communities and the adoption of a top-­ down approach to delineating Forest Management Units. Whether done at national or local level, defining the Permanent Forest Estate should use a participatory approach with widespread public consultation as well as detailed discussions with stakeholders, including indigenous people, environmental activists, the timber industry and groups involved in using the forest resources for various purposes such as recreation and leisure. It also needs to take account of relevant research findings. Forest Management Units may  also include plantation areas and do not necessarily have to be a single large block of forest. The size of a Forest Management Unit depends on a combination of the forest conditions and the objectives of management. It should take account of the need to spread management overheads over as large an  area as possible without compromising effi-

Overall Conclusions

ciency. For plantations it will depend on the owner or promoter and the amount of land that is available or has been acquired. If the primary objective of management is for timber production, then the size of the unit should in some way be related to the sustainable level of harvest, after allowing for non-productive areas and the likely use of the produce. If the main market is comprised of small local sawmills, a unit need not be large and may consist of several blocks spread over a wide area. On the other hand if the main user of the produce harvested is a large mill or an integrated wood processing facility, then a unit can be quite large. Temperate coniferous forests are generally much more productive of commercial timber than most mixed tropical forests in which only a proportion of the growing stock is commercially attractive, and so forest management units in the latter are likely to be larger than in the former. It is essential to review the external boundaries of each Forest Management Unit, whether new or created from an existing concession, to deal with any conflict or overlap with local communities or existing registered properties. Where the proposed boundary is inappropriate a community mapping exercise can be used to revise the boundary to eliminate areas that are already in use by the community. Having negotiated and agreed the line of the external boundary with all local stakeholders it is essential to have it clearly marked as soon as possible. The marking is done in a variety of ways, with some countries using wooden posts and others stone or concrete markers. Ideally the agreed boundary should be registered in the national cadastral system to minimise the possibility of future disputes. Considerable funds have been wasted in developing countries in marking boundaries that have subsequently been ignored by either land speculators or local communities. One of the main reasons that boundaries are ignored is lack of consultation with local communities and the adoption of a top-down approach to delineating Forest Management Units.

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Chapter 14 There is a conflict between the Sustainable Development Goals, especially numbers 1 and 2 that are concerned with Poverty and Hunger and number 15 that targets sustainable forest management. One of the targets for reducing poverty is to secure equal rights of access for all to economic resources, including land, but in the past this has meant clearing some forest to provide land for landless people who want to be farmers. Achieving food security and abolishing hunger and malnutrition requires increased agricultural productivity, which in the past has meant expanding agriculture rather than increasing inputs to produce more from the same land. The challenge to achieving sustainable forest management is how to increase the financial value of forests to reflect their economic value, without promoting an increase in illegal logging so that the opportunity cost of clearing forest is as great or greater than the alternative land-uses. Corporations that wish to clear forest for a commodity crop or livestock should be required to pay for the carbon that is stored in the forest. Having to pay around US$ 1000–2000 per ha might make them think twice about the amount of forest that they really need to clear. This will increase the cost for establishing the alternative crop and raise the opportunity cost of forest clearance. This has the advantage that it increases the value of the forest without creating an incentive to log illegally. Alternatively greenhouse gas emitters could enter into a contract with forest owners (state or private) to purchase the carbon in the forest with the condition that they will be refunded should any carbon be lost. This is a form of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation (RED), and would provide the funds for the sustainable management of the forest. Inconsistencies in production and trade data are common and are usually associated with illegal trade, but they have major implications for sustainable forest management and for carbon emissions, sequestering and trading. By importing wood products from another country whether

17 Conclusions

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legally or illegally, the importing country is displacing some of it emissions to the country from which it imports. Thus the apparent emissions of carbon dioxide in the exporting country may appear to be high, while the country that imports may appear to be a net sink for carbon dioxide. REDD+ investment in a timber exporting country that has illegal logging is compensating the country for failing to protect its forests and monitor and record properly what is going on. A priority is to secure all the remaining primary forest and designate it all as Permanent forest (1.23 billion ha), of which about 46% are tropical forests, 46% are temperate forests and 8% are subtropical. A second priority is to Certify all the designated Production forest and ensure that it is all part of the Permanent Forest Estate (1.17 billion ha) of which 52% are temperate forests, 30% are tropical and 14% are subtropical. Most of the remaining primary forest should be conserved to sustain biodiversity and environmental services, which will mean a big expansion of the Permanent Forest Estate in most countries from the current total of about 1.66–2.4 billion ha so that production forest excludes all primary forest.

Chapter 15 The lack of any threshold values and the use of words such as “appropriate” render many of the indicators more or less meaningless. For example, an indicator such as “an adequate number of trained personnel” begs the questions of “how many is adequate”? The African Timber Organisation Criteria and Indicators seem to be the most helpful, in that they focus mainly on what needs to be done at the Forest Management Unit level, which is the critical place for action. While the enabling environment is important in creating the conditions necessary to achieve sustainable forest management it’s the detail of how things are implemented in the field that will really determine the outcome. If the tropical forests are managed in conformity

with the ATO Criteria, then Sustainable Forest Management is achievable. Politicians have committed to the Sustainable Development Goals and public money is invested by governments and through multi-lateral and bi-­ lateral aid agencies in trying to achieve the sustainable management of all forests, so that it is imperative that ways can be found to verify that progress is being made. The various Criteria and Indicators help, but there is a lack of means for assessing progress with sustaining the ecosystem and environmental services. There is still uncertainty about all the conversion factors used to estimate carbon from measurements of tree stems or remotely sensed Vegetation Indices. There is also lack of information about the life cycle of wood and how it should be accounted. Biodiversity is not regularly monitored nor is water quality and flow, which are needed to verify that forest operations are being conducted properly. Low cost biodiversity surveys (Chap. 7) and community monitoring of water quality (Chap. 12) and similar low cost methods should be more widely used to verify that sustainability in the full sense of the concept is being achieved.

Chapter 16 It is doubtful if people are aware that the consumption of wood products, even if certified as having come from sustainably managed forests, may have indirectly led to deforestation or forest degradation by reducing the supply available for the domestic market in the exporting country. The message for politicians and the public in developed countries needs to include the historical context, and explain that some of the wealth that they enjoy today has come from exploitation of forests in what are currently developing countries. There are big questions as to who should organise campaigns to reach out to various audiences and how should campaigns be financed. At the moment it falls mainly to voluntary civil society organisations to raise money and organise campaigns and it

Overall Conclusions

is to be hoped that the public mainly in developed countries will continue to support such efforts, but it is doubtful if it will be enough. A series of Community Education and Public Awareness (CEPS) campaigns in each of the equatorial and subtropical countries that are still losing forest might cost a total of about US$ 150– 200 million annually for at least a 4 or 5 year period, while a series of CEPA campaigns to alert consumers in developed countries to the impact

199

of their demand for tropical forest products might cost around US$ 100 million annually for at least a 4–5 year period. It would be a big incentive to forest managers around the world to have their efforts recognised internationally by the awarding of an annual prize to a forest manager for the best progress or outstanding achievement towards sustainability in a managed forest. Such a prize might be sponsored by the United Nations Forum on Forests.

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Index

A Acacia, 8, 65, 76, 108, 128 Acer, 108 Addis Ababa, 19, 108 Additionality, 88, 131 Africa, 11, 19, 65, 82, 83, 104, 105, 109, 111, 125, 135, 141 African Timber Organisation (ATO), 169 Agroforestry, 9, 62, 64, 77 Allowable Annual Cut, 149 Alnus, 108, 130 Amazon, 71, 85, 169 Ancestral Domain, 59, 62 Andes, 71, 138 Annamites, 71 Aquilaria, 70 Argentina, 85 Arid, 12, 13, 16, 56, 57, 72, 73 Arunchal Pradesh, 112 Asia, 12, 19, 59, 65, 69, 80, 82, 84, 100, 102–105, 109, 111, 113, 135 Asian Development Bank, 42, 52, 65, 112, 116, 125 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Group, 169 Atlantic rain forests, 71 Auctioning, 127 Australia, 74, 83, 84, 102, 103, 143, 144, 196 Australian Conservation Foundation, 144 B Bamboo, 111, 138 Bangladesh, 42, 81, 110, 139 Baseline, 4, 73, 147, 150, 161, 185, 190 Baseline assessment, 73, 190 Bay of Bengal, 81, 139 Belgium, 176 Betula, 108 Biodiversity, 3, 4, 8, 25, 36, 39, 42, 44, 54, 55, 69, 72–74, 84, 86, 90, 130–134, 138, 139, 145, 147, 150, 167, 169, 171, 175, 178, 185, 187, 189, 190, 195, 198 Biodiversity Conservation Corridor, 42 Biomass Conversion and Extension Factor (BCEF), 86

Black Death, 14 Bolivia, 62 Bombay-Burma Company, 176 Brahmaputra river, 139 Brazil, 26, 38, 44, 49, 62, 71–73, 90, 101, 111, 125, 143 British Columbia, 34, 174 Burma Forest Service, 176 Buy Green, 175 C Calcium, 138 Calliandra, 130 Cambodia, 82, 117, 135, 162 Cameroon, 34, 38, 143 Canada, 16, 18, 49, 56, 72, 173, 174 Carbon dioxide, 3, 41–43, 79, 85–88, 91, 92, 131, 139, 140, 156, 159, 161, 163, 185, 190, 198 Carbon sequestration, 42 Caribbean, 13, 81 Casuarina equisetifolia, 138 Central America, 71, 169 Central Asia, 12, 13, 16, 56, 73 Central Highlands, 65, 82, 89, 125, 135 Central Kalimantan, 21 Certification, 4, 9, 11, 55, 73, 103, 104, 120, 168, 172, 174, 175, 184, 186, 192, 193 Charcoal, 79, 93, 94, 106, 107, 109, 111 China, 61, 82, 83, 111, 162, 168 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 25, 88 Climate change, 3, 25, 33, 43, 55, 70, 71, 75, 80, 81, 83–86, 88, 89, 111, 113, 125, 139, 140, 151, 152, 154, 156, 173 Community-based water quality monitoring, 135 Community biodiversity surveys, 74, 190 Community Education and Public Awareness (CEPA), 178, 179 COMTRADE, 162, 163 Contingent Valuation, 112 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 74 Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), 74, 102 Conversion factors, 79, 86, 91, 93, 103, 171, 198 Costa Rica, 34, 44, 47, 49, 50, 84, 90, 141

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210 Cote D’Ivoire, 34 Criteria and Indicators (C&I), 168 Croatia, 33 Cross-border issue, 162 Culbin, 138, 139 D Dark ages, 13 Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People, 60 Deforestation, 3, 4, 13, 16, 19–22, 35, 39, 41–44, 66, 69, 78, 82, 85, 87, 89–91, 96, 109, 157–159, 162, 172–174, 178–180, 189–191 Deforestation and forest degradation, 19, 25, 43, 88 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 19, 34, 49 Digital Elevation Model (DEM), 147 Direct value, 133 Doi Tung, 40, 65, 73, 87, 113, 188, 189 Drones, 55, 121, 131, 193 E Earth Summit, 173 Ecotourism, 32, 39, 133, 140–142, 150, 154, 195 Ecuador, 33 Edge effect, 69 Edge resilient, 70 Edge sensitive, 70 Edge thriving, 70 Education and training, 55, 56, 189 El Niňo (ENSO), 80 Encroachment, 39, 51, 54, 146, 151, 169, 170 Environmental impact assessment, 139 Environmental Inspection Agency, 162 Equatorial, 12, 16–19, 38, 56, 57, 72, 73 Erosion, 20, 25, 32, 44, 75–77, 80, 119, 135, 137, 138, 176, 187, 190, 195 Ethiopia, 19, 108 Eucalyptus, 8, 19, 108, 128 Eurasian Beaver, 175 Europe, 7, 13, 15, 26, 41, 71, 82, 83, 87, 102, 103, 105, 113, 120, 131, 141, 169, 172 European Commission, 170 European Forestry Institute, 170 European Trading Scheme (ETS), 91 European Union, 87, 100, 120, 192 European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR), 120 Existence value, 133 F Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA), 31 Fire protection, 151 Flash flooding, 20, 25, 77, 98, 134, 191 Flood Observatory, 135 Floods, 4, 75, 80, 82, 83, 134, 136, 159, 162, 174 Fodder, 114, 130 Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 11, 12, 23, 55, 107 Forecasts, 150, 151, 175

Index Forest Authority, 31, 47, 48 Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, 19 Forest degradation, 21, 85 Forest Europe, 7, 168, 172, 175 Forest Farmers Associations, 50, 188 Forest Investment Programme (FIP), 25 Forest Law Enforcement, Government and Trade (FLEGT), 87 Forest Management Units, 49, 54, 121, 142, 143, 145, 146, 169, 195–197 Forest Owner’s Associations, 50 Forest People’s Programme, 112 Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), 3–5, 186 Forestry and Forest Products Industry Council, 144 Forestry Commission, 31, 138 Forestry fund, 54 Forests for Livelihood Improvement in the Central Highlands Project (FLITCH), 65, 125 FORMIX-3, 156 Fragmentation, 25, 69–72, 74, 145, 189 France, 130, 133, 176 Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC), 60, 132 Fuelwood, 8, 9, 12, 19, 33, 50, 54, 65, 79, 87, 93–95, 98, 104, 106–109, 111, 112, 183, 191 G Gaharu, 111, 113 Gaur, 71, 72, 189 Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 55 Global Forest Resource Assessment (FRA), 11 Global Positioning System, 146 Grazing, 7, 8, 25, 50, 113, 114, 153 Great Bear Rainforest Campaign, 174 Greece, 7, 97, 149 Green House Gases (GHGs), 88 Growing stock, 21, 23, 55–57, 79, 86, 94–97, 100, 111, 115, 117, 120, 126, 147, 148, 161, 163, 167, 168, 171, 189–191 Guyana, 111 H Habitat, 25, 27, 32, 69–73, 120, 133, 145, 147, 175, 189 HCV Resource Network, 147 High Biodiversity Value, 39 High Conservation Value (HCV), 74, 127, 147, 160, 187, 194 Himalaya, 33 Home Range, 71, 72, 189 Hot spots, 39, 142, 187, 195 Hurricane, 81, 134 Hydro-power, 25, 33, 35, 43, 44, 66, 76, 83, 90, 190 I Illegal logging, 21, 35, 48, 51, 72, 73, 79, 86–88, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 103, 105, 115, 117–121, 125–129, 160–163, 169, 170, 174, 176, 183, 184, 190–194, 197, 198

Index Inconvenient Truth, 173 India, 33, 70, 76, 90, 111, 112, 138, 176 Indian Forest Service, 176 Indian Ocean, 81 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples’ Rights Convention, 60 Indigenous People, 59, 61–63 Indirect value, 133 Indochina, 71 Indonesia, 3, 9, 17, 21, 22, 34, 36, 38, 44, 49, 52, 66, 81, 91, 98, 99, 101, 111, 115, 118, 136, 137, 143, 148, 156, 176 Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Programme, 3 Industrial roundwood, 93–98, 103, 107, 117, 167, 168, 183, 190, 191 Intergovernmental Forum on Forests, 3, 159 Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, 3 Internal Rate of Return, 131 The International Consortium on Combatting Wildlife Crime (ICCWC), 74 International Cooperative Biological Groups, 132 International Labour Office, 60 International Monetary Fund, 52, 63, 160 International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), 105 International Union for the Conservation of nature (IUCN), 102 International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO), 55, 170 INTERPOL, 74, 118, 120, 121 IPCC 4th Assessment, 80 Italy, 83 J JABOWA-3, 156 Jambi, 21, 22 Japan, 23, 105 Joint Management of Forests, 33 Jurisdictional approach, 91 K Kaeng Krachan National Park, 7 Kenya, 65, 112 Keystone species, 73 Korea, 50 Kyoto accord, 88 L Lacey Act (1900), 120 Land Development Act, 31 LANDSAT, 115, 148 Land-use, Land-use Change and Forestry (LULUCF), 171 Land-use planning, 35 Lao PDR, 8, 19, 42, 52, 62, 64, 78, 79, 87, 111, 117, 118, 141, 162, 163 Latin America, 19, 65, 66, 82, 83 Leakage, 25, 91, 174 Lepaterque Group, 169

211 Leuceana, 130 LIDAR, 148, 171 Low impact logging, 85 Luzon, 20, 90 M Madagascar, 76, 81 Mahogany, 176 Malawi, 83 Malaysia, 31, 76, 81, 111, 141, 156, 176 Management Information Systems (MIS), 55 Management Plan, 149–152 Management Unit, 39, 137, 138, 145–149, 154, 160, 161, 170, 172, 184, 187, 195, 196, 198 Mangrove forests, 80 Mangroves, 139 Manupali river, 135 Maps, 19, 146, 150, 169 Market failure, 52, 160 Marrakech Accords, 90 Medium and High Density Fibreboard (MDF/HDF), 101 Medium density fibreboard, 93 Mekong river, 82 Mekong River Committee, 135 Melanesia, 81 Mexico, 44 Migration Corridor, 70 Mindanao, 20, 60, 135 Minimum Viable Population, 70, 189 Monocultures, 8, 104, 130, 131, 153, 170 Montreal Group, 169 Morus, 130 Multi-purpose trees, 77 Myanmar, 61, 81 N National Forest Inventory, 99, 148 National Forest Policy, 144 National Forestry Council, 47, 50 National Land Agency, 36 National Park, 12, 39, 49, 54, 61, 62, 66, 72, 74, 133, 141 National Tree Planting Day, 180 Natural Capital, 45, 161, 162 Natural Capital Coalition, 45 Natural forest, 8, 12, 21, 24, 26, 27, 35, 52, 54, 65, 85, 86, 95, 96, 102, 104, 111, 120, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 137, 142, 152, 154, 160, 175, 192, 194, 195 Natural Resource Accounting, 161 Nature and Ecosystem Experience Classification Schema (NEECS), 142 Nature Reserves, 54, 72 Net Present Value, 44, 150 Net primary production, 84, 86, 87 Netherlands, 176 New Caledonia, 72 New South Wales, 74 New Zealand, 97, 102, 103, 113

Index

212 Nigeria, 23, 35 Nitrogen, 138 Non-timber forest products, 65, 74, 106, 111–113, 120, 125, 131 Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), 70 North America, 71, 82, 83, 102–104, 131, 141, 156 O Objectives of Management, 149, 150 Opportunity cost, 43, 89, 91, 138, 150, 160, 161, 197 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 56, 107, 179 Oriented Strand Board (OSB), 101 Orissa, 112 P Pacific, 13, 59, 81, 82, 111 Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)., 81 Pakistan, 134 Palm Oil Action Group, 174 Pan-European, 169, 170, 172 Paper, 9, 24, 33, 45, 53, 62, 65, 80, 93, 94, 98, 99, 103, 111, 117, 119, 163, 193 Papua New Guinea, 34, 90 Paraguay, 62 Paris Climate Agreement, 157 Particleboard, 93, 101 Payment for Ecological/Environmental Services (PES), 25, 44 Payments for Environmental Services, 44, 90, 91 Per capita consumption, 94, 100, 116, 167, 183, 190 Per capita GDP, 17, 18, 57, 100 Performance Bonds, 52 Permanent Forest Estate (PFE), 38, 95, 104, 143, 145, 159, 167, 169, 180, 196, 198 Permanent Sample Plots, 148 Peru, 38, 113 Philippines, 20, 59, 60, 81, 84, 90, 135, 162, 178 Phosphorus, 138 Plantations, 8, 12, 95, 104, 128–130, 139, 144, 195 Political Will, 34, 187 Polynesia, 81 Population, 12–19, 21, 23, 33, 34, 36, 40, 42, 50, 54, 62, 64, 73, 77, 80–82, 87, 94, 100, 113, 116, 118, 129, 133–135, 137, 143, 150–153, 163, 167, 168, 175, 179, 183, 186, 194, 195 Population density, 12–18, 21, 40, 64, 135 Portugal, 176 Potassium, 138 Present Value, 131, 160 Primary forest, 11, 27, 186 Problem Tree Analysis, 27, 28 Production forests, 25 Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), 5, 186 Protected Area Database, 141 Protected Areas, 72, 74, 104, 120, 141, 143, 150 Public Advisory Groups, 34

Pulangi river, 135 Pulp, 8, 23, 24, 62, 65, 93, 100, 102, 103, 111, 117, 119, 129, 193 Pyrus, 130 Q Quick Biodiversity Surveys, 74 R Rabobank, 125 RADAR, 148 Rainfall, 75, 81–84, 111, 134–138, 178, 195 Ramin, 23, 176 Rattan, 111 Recovery factors, 101, 130 REDDiness Preparation Proposal (R-PP), 19 Reduced Impact Logging, 120, 193 Rent-seeking, 63, 126, 127 Republic of Korea, 31 Reserve Forest, 39 Resource Rent Tax, 52 The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), 75 Riparian forest, 55, 127, 131, 194 Road density, 155, 156 Robinia, 130 Rockies, 71 Root/Shoot ratio factor, 86 Rosewood, 23 Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), 174 Royal Forest Department, 49 Royalties, 32, 52–54, 98, 105, 191 Rural poverty, 59, 62, 63 Russian Federation, 16, 18, 72, 97 Rwanda, 65 S Salix, 8, 108, 128, 130 Satellite imagery, 121, 193 Sawn wood, 23, 93, 101 Scandinavia, 34 Scenarios, 105, 144, 184, 196 Scotland, 53, 108, 113, 138, 175 Seed dispersal, 27, 71, 178 Selective logging, 126 Sesan river, 135 Sesbania, 130 Shifting cultivation, 19, 20, 41, 42, 59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 79, 87, 138, 139, 195 Singapore, 111 Slovenia, 72 Smartwood, 9 Soil conservation, 134 Soil erosion, 25, 32, 75, 83, 98, 125, 137, 138, 154, 186, 191, 195 Sorbus, 130 Spain, 176 Spatial Multiple-Criteria Analysis, 140

Index Spatial Planning, 36 Species–Area-Relationship, 69 Srepok river, 82, 135 Sri Lanka, 111 Stakeholders, 32, 33, 35, 43, 53, 139, 143, 144, 187, 196 State Timber Company Perhutani, 8–9 Statutory body, 47–49 Stern Review, 89 Strategic Environmental Assessments, 36 Stung Treng, 135 Subtropical, 12, 13, 16, 56, 57, 72, 73 Sumatra, 22 Sundarbans, 139 Suriname, 21, 22, 27, 148 Suspended solids, 32, 135, 187 Sustainable Development Goals, 3, 157, 159, 171, 197, 198 Sustainable Forest Management (SFM), 5, 7, 12, 23, 25, 26, 32, 34, 43, 88, 168, 170, 171, 175, 198 Sweden, 50 SYMFOR, 85, 156 System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA), 161 System of National Accounts, 161 T Tamil Nadu, 76, 138 Tapajos National Forest, 26, 65, 145 Tax concessions, 51, 52 Teak, 23, 102, 176 Temperate, 12, 16, 18, 56, 57, 72, 73, 84, 145, 197 Terapole Group, 169 Thailand, 7, 39, 40, 49, 61, 81, 102, 117, 134, 176 Tilia, 130 Timber processing industry, 47, 73, 101 Totally Protected Zone, 141 Tourism, 25, 32, 33, 48, 65, 80, 84, 140, 144 Transaction costs, 25, 43, 44, 54, 88, 89, 91 Tuvalu's Forest Retention Incentives Scheme, 90 Typhoon, 134

213 U Uganda, 70, 134 Ulmus, 130 UN Conference on Environment and Development, 3 UNESCO, 48 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 3 UN Forum on Forests, 3 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 88 United Kingdom, 31, 105 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), 118 United Nations General Assembly, 60 United Nations Office on Drug Control, 74 United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), 161 United States of America, 24, 33, 172, 173, 176 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), 121, 193 USA, 51, 74, 119, 120 V Veneers, 102, 104, 162, 191, 192 Venezuela, 72, 111 Vietnam, 31, 35, 42, 65, 76, 81, 82, 89, 111, 116, 117, 125, 128, 135, 162, 163 Voluntary Partnership Agreements, 87–88, 103, 120, 174 Vorest, 156 W Watershed protection forest, 136 Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES), 162 Wildlife Sanctuaries, 62, 72 Willingness to Pay, 133 Wood-based panels, 93, 100, 102, 103, 192 World Bank, 19, 52, 55, 62, 64, 72, 74, 91, 92, 100, 136, 159, 162 World Customs Organisation, 74 Z Zambia, 83 Zimbabwe, 83