Annual Report 1997

Global scenarios for tropical forests

At the global level, CIFOR’s analyses have led to a number of likely scenarios for the future of forests. Timber harvesting pressures on natural forests are expected to decline, but timber production from plantations will grow. The costs of taking trees from natural forests have been rising, while at the same time the ability to produce timber at low cost and in strategic locations on plantations has been expanding.

The pressures to convert forests to agriculture will be greatest in Asia. They will be considerably less in South America, and minimal in Africa. The demand for tropical forest products in the future will be from the newly industrialised nations of the South, including China, India and the emerging economies of the Pacific Rim. South-South trade will be more important than South-North trade in setting the patterns of forest use.

As the world’s population grows, it will depend heavily on biomass, or matter of biological origin, from tropical forests and plantations for meeting its energy and industrial raw material needs. The nature of the evolution of the supply and demand for these products will have a major influence on pressures on forest lands in the 21st century. Poor people will continue to depend on tropical forests. Industrial economies will develop, and much of the South’s population will become urban, but the reliance on forests will continue. Understanding the dynamics of these changes represents a major scientific challenge.

The conservation of biodiversity can co-exist with forest production. After an era in which environmentalists and many policy makers argued that biodiversity cannot be conserved without an end to deforestation, CIFOR finds an emerging pragmatism which is based on a more express weighting of the values of different components of biodiversity. Research in coming years is likely to demonstrate that biodiversity conservation needs can be met through the allocation of smaller areas of forest to total protection, and through the adaptation of management regimes for other forest areas to optimise the combined benefits of biodiversity and production.

None of this research can have an impact, however, unless policy makers and opinion leaders receive and use the results. With this in mind, CIFOR has begun to examine what type of information and sources policy makers used in the past to make their decisions, beginning with a study of the role of policy research in the formulation of new forestry laws in Bolivia, Cameroon, Costa Rica and Indonesia.

To disseminate research results, CIFOR has also created two electronic mailing lists. The first is a general list for forest policy experts (POLEX), that currently reaches some 600 key decision makers and opinion leaders concerned with policy affecting forests. The second is exclusively on Bolivian forestry issues and reaches some 200 people concerned with forest issues in that country.

A special workshop was held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where research results were presented to the Cameroon forestry community, and future research priorities were discussed.

CIFOR’s research on ‘Policies, Technologies and Global Changes’ gathers and maintains a comprehensive overview of knowledge about the world’s tropical forests, including their current state, as well as information on the international organisations that deal with those forests.

With that information, scientists analyse global trends in the patterns and structure of international supply and demand. This is not limited to logs and timber, but includes all the goods and services that societies draw from tropical forests. CIFOR is actively represented in international gatherings on the subject of forests, and contributes to analyses and policy recommendations.

In 1997, CIFOR collaborated with FAO in a survey of the outlook for the Asian Pacific forestry sector; co-authored studies of an outlook for non-timber forest products and of prospects for conservation, and participated in the production of a CD-ROM containing data and analysis for the World Forests Review, in collaboration with FAO, the European Forestry Institute and the Finnish Forest Research Institute. Other efforts included a study of the future of dwellers of tropical forests; an examination of innovative institutional arrangements for the management of forests around the world; a study of the economic valuation of forests; and continuing contributions to international fora including the 1997 World Forestry Congress in Turkey.

As an illustration of the rapidly changing environment in which CIFOR functions, the Center became heavily involved during the last half of 1997 with the planning of research on an unanticipated global forest policy issue: the fires that ravaged Southeast Asian forests. CIFOR issued a position statement on ‘Fires in Indonesia in 1997’ which was heavily quoted by the media and others (see page 54 for extracts from this statement).