Sustainable forest management: lessons of history and recent developments

Through the ages, forests have occupied a unique yet ambiguous position in the human subconscious and imagination, as well as in society, oscillating between two opposite and conflicting poles. In one, forests were cleared wherever the economic expansion or growth of local populations or entire nations apparently so required (and they still are in much of the developing world) to make room for other forms of land use, mostly agriculture and grazing. They were, and still are, seen as obstacles to "development". Often enough, forests and wooded areas were even viewed as threatening, perhaps accursed places, home to evil spirits, demons, witches and savage beasts. Indeed, the root word for forest in several Indo-European languages is "for", meaning "that which lies outside" (outside the home, village or everyday use): alien and thereby invoking our instinctive distrust for unfamiliar beings and things. In certain industrialized countries, where the forest is recolonizing the rural landscape, some do not hesitate to describe the physical and psychological pressure it exerts on people as "the stranglehold of the forest".

In the other and opposite pole forests are seen - for example, by some urban dwellers in the industrialized countries - as one of the last and most important havens of unspoilt and "genuine" nature. Forests, particularly unutilized, unmodified, unmanipulated, uncultivated and unmanaged forests (or nearly so), thus become a link in the chain that binds us to a pristine dawn world, long before the advent of the plough, when small groups lived sustainably and self-sufficiently in the virgin forests, hunting or gathering to meet their subsistence needs. This concept of the forest has come back in force in the last two decades in a "back-to-nature" movement that finds particularly fertile and broad expression in the debate on the conservation of biological diversity. The ordinary person, quite dismayed by the growing and seemingly inexorable "artificialization" of his or her life context, easily finds this a compelling argument.

As in all realms of human thought and action, the way to reconcile different people, and people with the forest, may well be to take an approach that addresses both of these antithetical views. Forests must be seen not as an obstacle to development but as one of its sustainable tools. Forest management must be seen as an instrument for conserving the biological diversity of our planet, averting climate change and enhancing our life context, and not as a component of global "artificialization". This is the challenge for every forest manager and for all of the "major groups" (as defined in UNCED Agenda 21) who have an interest or responsibility in this domain, particularly local communities, non-governmental development and conservation organizations, the private sector and the intergovernmental organizations, especially FAO. This is the same challenge as that expressed in the Paris Declaration of the Tenth World Forestry Congress in 1991 and in the Forest Principles adopted by UNCED in June 1992, and upon which a great many countries, organizations, conferences and international initiatives have focused over the past three years: balanced and sustainable forest management for the conservation and development of forest ecosystems.

SOME LESSONS FROM HISTORY The global challenge facing the world's forests can only be tackled successfully if we learn what the history of society and that of forests have to teach. We must be realistic even when the scope of the challenge calls for some optimistic and even utopian thinking. The lessons are many: only those that seem most essential are presented below.

Within the boundaries of nations, social evolution from hunter and gatherer to modern postindustrial societies generally shows a decreasing curve of land area in the form of an inverted S-curve whose pulsations represent alternate phases of accentuated deforestation and relative reforestation corresponding to apogees of civilization, e.g. the Khmer and Mayan empires from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, contrasting with post-war, post-epidemic periods that decimated "forest-clearing" populations. With industrial development, the flow of deforestation slows to a threshold which may be very low - only 3 percent of the United Kingdom was covered by forest at the beginning of this century - from which the forest area again expands through natural regeneration, forestation and reforestation. Although this evolutionary model is not inevitable (any country at any time can diverge from the pattern through clear and forceful policies favouring the forest), historical analysis, particularly of the industrialized countries, shows this pattern to be generally valid. One of the corollaries of the reduction of forest area in a given zone is the fragmentation of the initial forest cover into more or less isolated stands, with all the ensuing implications for the management of these resources and the maintenance of their biological diversity.

Abundance, whether of forests or any other natural resource, is a poor counsellor: history, unhappily, shows that rational and measured resource use is only resorted to when people's needs can no longer be met. And despite the proliferation of national, regional and global plans, programmes and other strategies, no significant progress seems to have been made by human society in the effective anticipation of scarcity. It seems that where there is abundance, or presumed abundance, people are no more willing now than in centuries past to listen to the true prophets. Again, there is nothing inevitable about this, but if our goal is to promote sustainable forest management, we would be unwise to ignore this historical constant.

Scarcity, although the usual precondition for clear and forceful policies aimed at sustainable resource management, is not sufficient reason alone, however. Again, history has much to teach us. The shortage of wood for ship's timbers in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century failed to induce all European governments to manage their forest resources on a permanent basis. Although the Venetian Republic of the sixteenth century and the Kingdom of France in the seventeenth did begin to introduce measures and management plans to ensure a regular supply of timber from their own forests, other European countries preferred to depend on foreign and sometimes overseas resources. Recent history shows that many wood-deficit countries have been neither politically resolute nor materially successful in managing their forests. Unquestionably, in many developing countries the primary reason for this is the lack of financial, technical and institutional resources, and, not surprisingly, UNCED's Forest Principles stress this. An additional and obvious problem is the very low priority accorded the forest sector in countries whose first objective is to bridge the food and energy gap of their people, although trees and forests do clearly contribute in many ways to food security and, of course, directly to domestic energy.

There is no guarantee of success even where the political will and priority to the sector are present. Participatory and intersectoral approaches may still be lacking; forestry actions are often not integrated into overall land-use planning and management at the local and national levels; the negative impact of policies and actions in related sectors such as demographics, agriculture, energy and industrial development on sustainable forest management is not addressed; local participation in the design and im-plementation of forestry programmes is not enlisted, and appropriate training, incentives and financial investment are lacking.

Another basic consideration is simply the length of time it takes to produce wood, generally the main source of forest revenue. This time-lag means that investments in forest management are slow to return benefits, to private owners, and to national and local authorities whose political lifetimes tend to be much shorter than forest production cycles. Thus, only a tiny portion of forest income is ploughed back into the forest by the owners, impeding sustainable management and even threatening the survival of the forest itself. At least one solution to this acute and longstanding problem would be to assess all goods and services provided by the forest and then "internalize" these "externalities" into economic accounting. Soil and water conservation, downstream protection of human lives and infrastructure, the conservation of biological diversity, enhancement of overall living conditions and the cultural and aesthetic values inherent in the forest should all be figured into the equation. Nowhere near enough research has been done on estimating the economic value of forest services and including them in price-setting mechanisms. Since economic considerations are what makes the world go round, such a step could be an objective and non-coercive means of sustaining forests.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS Based on the Brundtland Commission's definition of sustainable development, which stresses meeting the needs of present and future generations, FAO and its Governing Bodies have concluded that for agriculture, forestry and fisheries, sustainable development also implies the conservation of land, water and the genetic patrimony, and the utilization of technically appropriate, economically viable and socially acceptable techniques not harmful to the environment.

To simplify, sustainable forest management is the tool allowing forests to contribute fully to sustainable development overall. The novelty of the concept of sustainable forest management - as compared to the most advanced forms of forest management in use today whether by the national forest services, communities or the private sector - is primarily its systematic approach to sustaining each component of the forest ecosystem and their interactions.

In forests which can be used for wood production, this means combining production with other management objectives, above all the conservation of plant and animal biological diversity and soil and water conservation. Similar intentions were not lacking in the classic management concept of sustained yield (for wood), primarily in the most erosion-prone mountain areas, but it is now agreed that forest management must systematically address the full range of issues. Multipurpose forest management is a form of sustainable forest management to the extent that its objectives and means sustain the essential functions and components of the forest ecosystem.

FAO's definition of sustainable development requires a basis of technically appropriate, economically viable and socially acceptable methods. Concerning the first, experience, empiricism and caution have so far partly offset the lack of technical knowledge on the function of forest ecosystems and on how different interventions affect them. As for economic viability, the lack of tools available for quantitative assessment of the services offered by forest ecosystems has already been mentioned. This is a particularly serious barrier to sustainable forest management and retaining forest cover in the developing countries. Last, social acceptability differs according to whether the context is national or local. In the national context, an industrialized country where the urban public prevails differs from a developing country where most of the population is rural.

The complexity of the concept of sustainable forest management is on a par with the complexity of the relevant ecosystems. To be able to apply the concept as clearly and simply as possible, it is essential to describe it in terms of guiding principles and criteria and the corresponding quantitative or descriptive indicators.

Criteria for sustainable forest management

Over the past three years, a number of countries, for example, Canada, have attempted to identify criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management at the national and the forest management unit levels. This has been paralleled by international initiatives by countries with comparable forest situations: timber-producing countries in the humid tropics under the auspices of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO); European countries as part of the follow-up to the Ministerial Conferences on the Protection of Forests in Europe, held in Strasbourg in 1990 and in Helsinki in 1993 (known as the Helsinki process); and non-European temperate and boreal countries as part of the follow-up to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe seminar of experts on the sustainable development of temperate and boreal forests, held in Montreal in 1993 (known as the Montreal process), are examples. Additionally, international environmental protection organizations, particularly the World Wide Fund for Nature, have also attempted to define sustainable forest management.