Assessing the Sustainability of Forest Management: Testing Criteria and IndicatorsInternational interest in developing criteria and indicators (C&I) reached new heights in 1996 as a result of their inclusion in the agenda of the Inter-governmental Panel on Forests of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. The results of the first phase of field tests (in Germany, Indonesia, Côte d'Ivoire, Brazil and Austria) revealed that more than half the criteria and indicators proposed as relevant for the policy and legal framework, ecological and production aspects were common to all test sites. There was however a marked and sharp divergence regarding the social aspects of forest management. The tests also revealed that considerable work is still needed to make the conceptual framework of principles, criteria, indicators and verifiers more consistent and operational. Based on the identification of gaps in existing knowledge, additional work also commenced on management impacts on biodiversity, social aspects, and on the sustainability of forests managed by local communities for multiple purposes (see pages 20-22). A pre-test of eight social science methods in and around the Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, was completed and evaluated. A participatory card sorting technique was revised and adopted as very useful in determining the roles of relevant local stakeholders. In this method, people ranked stakeholders by importance in forest management and by frequency of interaction. Accurate assessments of sustainably managed forests must ensure that the real managers of forests, not just the "official" managers, have been included. Improved criteria and indicators to assess the impacts of forest management on biodiversity were developed through a series of workshops, the first of these dealing with genetic criteria and indicators. Led by Gene Namkoong of the University of British Columbia, a team of six eminent geneticists concluded that relevant, scientifically valid criteria and indicators should be based on the processes that maintain genetic diversity. However, since forest managers cannot be expected to understand how these complex processes work, a system was designed to allow managers to determine which genetic criteria and indicators may be important to assess, based on a description of activities going on in the forest. These proposals were subsequently field tested in Kribi, Cameroon. A Cameroonian forest ecologist, Oscar Eyog-Matig assisted the team. The indicators originally proposed were found to be acceptable with a few minor modifications. The researchers also discussed several approaches to combining data from the nominated indicators to give an overall assessment of genetic sustainability and the potential to restore or improve sustainability where necessary. Research continues on this complex issue. A sixth test of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management was conducted in Cameroon, the most complicated test so far. It involved six (three-person) inter-disciplinary teams evaluating sets of C&I from the African Timber Organisation, the Dutch Working Group and CIFOR. In all, eighteen experts (half of them from Cameroon) participated in the evaluations supported by eight additional scientists, including four from CIFOR headquarters. Data analysis is still under way, but a few results have emerged, especially regarding the methods used. A minimum of two weeks in the field plus preparation time must be provided to teams for the evaluation of criteria and indicators. Shared experience and shared values improve the ability of teams to work under time pressures (although this did not always result in improved quality of output). Preliminary Cameroon results appear consistent with the common features obtained in Indonesia, Côte d'Ivoire, Brazil and Austria (Prabhu et al., 1996. Testing Criteria and Indicators for the Sustainable Management of Forests: Phase 1. Final Report). However this conclusion must await further investigation. A full report on the Cameroon test will be available by March 1997. This research has been supported by the European Union, GTZ (Germany), DGIS (Netherlands) and USAID.
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