| [Back to front page] | Criteria and indicators CIFOR’s research on ‘Assessing the Sustainability of Forest Management: Developing Criteria and Indicators’ looks at ways to distinguish between sustainable and unsustainable management practices in tropical forests. The results will be incorporated into a system of ‘Criteria and Indicators’ or standards by which a forest unit and its management are assessed. The system would be objective, relevant and cost-effective (see BOX: ‘What are C&I?’). Policy makers and managers must understand the biological and human history, environmental conditions, productivity, and dynamics of the places they are managing in order to evaluate sustainability. The managers and planners must also understand the possible future directions their forests may take and the future results of present-day actions. CIFOR research has highlighted the fact that there is too much variation for any one set of C&I to be valid across the globe. A large number of locally relevant initiatives have been developed in several countries. To be useful, CIFOR’s efforts had to be directed towards enabling these locally relevant initiatives to develop C&I sets that are also scientifically sound and internationally compatible. To satisfy very diverse needs means providing the basic tools necessary for C&I development. Working with some 30 partners in all continents, CIFOR has coordinated the evaluation of numerous sets of criteria and indicators. Interdisciplinary groups have worked in forest sites in Austria, Brazil, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Germany, Indonesia and India, using methodology that ensures the involvement of all local stakeholders. Much of the C&I work addresses two main categories of forest life: biological diversity and social sustainability. In the case of biodiversity, CIFOR recognises that adequate information could never be assembled on all the species, from tree to soil microbe, that inhabit a forest ecosystem – let alone the genetic diversity within each of those species. But a set of criteria and indicators can be developed that allows a rapid assessment of key components of the forest. They can include birds, which can serve as surrogates for the variety of organisms that comprise their habitat, and frogs, or components of water quality, or any number of other indicators. In developing measures of social sustainability, CIFOR hopes to determine the threshold levels at which human activities move from being benign to causing harm to the forest. Closely related to this is the level of well-being of the people who live in and around the forest. C&I here relate to questions of whether people have access to the forest’s resources; have secure tenure and rights to use the forest; receive their fair share of forest benefits; and are able to participate in forest management and in making important decisions that affect both the forest and their own livelihoods. During 1997, the project continued to assemble a ‘toolbox of techniques’ for the development of C&I. Such a collection of near-generic tools are seen as devices to assist national initiatives to develop criteria and indicators that would be useful locally, but that would also be compatible and comparable with C&I in use elsewhere. CIFOR envisages the toolbox as initially containing all the tools necessary for C&I development. At later stages it could also be expanded to contain the tools necessary for C&I application. The toolbox will comprise, among other things, components to assess impacts on biodiversity; calculate the degree of intergenerational access to forest resources and participation in decisions about them; and provide indications of health of a planted forest. Appropriate C&I can assist in assessing the feasibility of forest certification programmes. In many countries, forest managers, traders and national governments recognise the benefits of managing forests sustainably and advertising that fact. This can be done by certification programmes, also sometimes referred to as ‘ecolabelling.’ Communities that participate in certification programmes gain leverage in their dealings with governments and financial institutions, since sustainable forestry can translate into lower risk for an investor. This can then result in better local access to credit, grants and tenure security. But what should the standards of such a programme be? CIFOR has led a global effort to evaluate the criteria and indicators that are most useful in setting up such standards. C&I can indicate the level of security of forest users’ tenure and use rights by determining if rights are well-defined; if forest people share in the economic benefits of forest use; and if there are opportunities for local people and others dependent on the forest to find employment and training with forest companies. A valuable end result of CIFOR’s work on criteria and indicators will be the creation of a knowledge-based system, based on C&I, to aid in decision making by forest managers. And the most important gain from the project is to be able to discern clearly between sustainable and unsustainable forest management practices and so reduce uncertainty about environmental and social costs of logging and other kinds of forest use. Guidelines are being prepared for developing and testing criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management based on CIFOR’s field research methods. Widespread dissemination through channels that include the internet will enable testing of the C&I in forests managed by local communities and for planted forests. Feedback to CIFOR will be incorporated into the final set of criteria and indicators proposed. The guidelines will be a product of 1998. The methods presented so far are directed to natural forests at the forest management unit level, especially in the tropics. This manual is expected to be used by those interested in developing tools for on-site assessment of the quality and performance of forest management systems such as certification bodies, government officials, funding agencies, forest managers, project managers and scientists. A ‘C&I Resource Book’ is currently being compiled that contains a ‘generic C&I template’. The Resource Book will provide a short profile on relevant and practicable principles, criteria and indicators considered as a minimum necessary to assess sustainable forest management. It is intended for use in conjunction with the guidelines and as a stand alone reference. It is important to note that the C&I Resource Book will not replace the need to develop regional or locally adapted C&I. It is a tool to facilitate this process. To be useful a C&I set must have a defined validity and scope. CIFOR’s current work in natural forests, forests managed by local communities and plantation forests should allow this ‘generic template’ to expand to include these other forms of forest management in the humid tropics. In so doing, scientists should be in a position to identify the factors that delimit the scope of a particular indicator or verifier. This work should broaden the common platform for sustainable forest management.
Research results from CIFOR’s research on reduced-impact logging will provide the
C&I related to more conventional aspects of forestry. |