CIFOR's International Role and Profile
The international debate on criteria and indicators for assessing sustainability has had an important impact on thinking about forestry. Our work on Testing Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management has been especially useful in bringing science to bear on some of the difficult issues involved. It has shown that assessing sustainability of the yields of conventional forest products is relatively easy and can be based on a hundred or more years of conventional forestry practice. Objectively assessing the impacts of forestry on biodiversity and on the social, cultural and economic well-being of the diverse forest stakeholders is much more complex. This need to identify all the elements that are pertinent to the debate on "sustainability" forces close examination of the objectives of forestry. People began to realise that sustainability can mean different things to different people both between countries and within countries. Sustainability is not a fixed steady-state situation but is a function of societies' needs and so varies over space and time. The increasingly technical nature of the IPF debates has decreased the polarisation of views on forests. Even the most radical NGOs now recognise that the best conservation strategies must embrace use of the forest to meet both national development needs and the needs of the hundreds of millions of people who depend on forests in the tropics. Similarly industries and government forest departments are increasingly pro-active in attempting to curtail adverse social and environmental impacts of industrial forestry. The debate is shifting from being one about "halting deforestation" to being about how much forest do we need and for what purposes, how should the forests be distributed through the landscape, and who should be responsible for their care. CIFOR's research has contributed to many elements of the IPF debate. One of the final inter-sessional meetings of the IPF took place at Kochi in southern Japan, and focused on incorporating research into forest management at the field level. The meeting concluded that new cultures of scientific research are needed to address forestry issues in a much more holistic manner. It went further than previous commentaries on this subject in advocating that research be fully integrated in forest management at the management unit level. Forests were also prominent in the debate of the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the Convention on Biological Diversity and of its Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA). The COP, meeting in Buenos Aires in November, agreed on research priorities for conserving forest biodiversity. CIFOR contributed to the formulation of these priorities, both through the workshop that we sponsored at the COP meeting in Jakarta in late 1995, and through our participation in the SBSTTA meeting in Montreal. CIFOR's own research agenda has evolved significantly since our initial Medium Term Plan was adopted in 1993 and now addresses a number of the Convention on Biological Diversity priorities. Participants in the Convention recognise that a great deal of biodiversity will have to be conserved in managed forests and that protected areas alone will never be sufficient. Also in 1996, the International Tropical Timber Agreement was re-negotiated. CIFOR has
worked closely with the Secretariat of the International Tropical Timber Organization
(ITTO), both in our work on Criteria and Indicators and in a number of policy areas
related to reduced-impact logging and the impact of various trade regimes on forests.
Recently we initiated negotiations with the ITTO for collaboration in support of
sustainable forest management at the CIFOR research forest in Bulungan, East Kalimantan. CIFOR is an impartial international source of authoritative information on tropical forestry and related social issues |