Jeffrey A. Sayer, Director General
Director General's Report
1997 in Perspective
1997 may be remembered as the year in which international forestry initiatives finally turned from discussion to decisions and action.
A feature of many of the year’s events was a reduction in the polarisation and antagonism in the debate and the emergence of consensus and collaboration on many key issues. CIFOR was active in the international arena and we were able to contribute scientific knowledge on many important topics.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Forests met in New York in February. Interventions on virtually all topics highlighted the need for better information and analysis. This led the Governments of Brazil, USA, Indonesia and the representative of the European Union, among others, to make strong pleas for the final Co-chairmen’s report to recommend ‘that mechanisms be established to strengthen research and information dissemination on forests’. The final text of the Co-chairmen’s report to the UNCSD in April gave CIFOR the responsibility for taking forward this process. Paragraph 94 of the Co-chairmen’s report requested CIFOR:
- ‘in collaboration with relevant organizations and in consultation with a group of internationally recognized experts, as well as in conjunction with national, regional, intergovernmental and non-governmental bodies, to develop as soon as possible mechanisms to:
- guide the identification and definition as well as prioritization of global and eco-regional interdisciplinary research problems, taking into account national priorities and closely linked to practical and operational forest management issues;
- promote consortia or networks to lead and organize global forest research and ensure that results are made available to all users;
- build global capacity for forest research and develop new and innovative means to disseminate information and technologies;
- mobilize resources to accomplish the above objectives.’
CIFOR was thereby recognised at the highest level of the UNCSD as the focal point for further developing international mechanisms for strengthening forestry research. Subsequently, FAO Assistant Director General for Forestry, Dr David Harcharik, invited CIFOR to become a member of the Interagency Taskforce on Forests which is the official UN mechanism through which intergovernmental agencies provide technical support to international forest initiatives and policy deliberations, particularly the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests.
Further recognition of the importance of forests and the significance of CIFOR’s role emerged through the debates of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). A meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) for the CBD, focused on forest biodiversity conservation, recognised that the vast majority of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity occurs in forests.
But also, and more significantly for CIFOR, that a great deal of this biodiversity must be conserved in managed forests, and utilised for timber and other products. SBSTTA established priorities for the research and information needs for the conservation of forest biodiversity and thereby endorsed several activities already included in CIFOR’s research programme. Understanding what happens to biodiversity in disturbed systems and developing mechanisms to assess and monitor biodiversity in forests were formally recognised as being major international research priorities.
In the latter part of the year the focus of the forestry community turned to the World Forestry Congress in Antalya, Turkey. CIFOR was well-represented and several CIFOR scientists presented papers in different sessions of the Congress. Recognition of CIFOR’s role was also given by my own nomination as a Vice-President of the Congress.
We felt that the conference deliberations and resolutions gave an international endorsement to CIFOR’s priority research areas and that already, at this our first World Congress, we were fully accepted by the global forestry community. But as several thousand of the world’s leading forestry specialists gathered in Antalya, elsewhere in the world devastating fires provoked by the El Niņo phenomenon were occurring. These fires exposed the practical problems caused by poor management of forest lands.
For CIFOR, the fires in Southeast Asia towards the end of the year provided a sobering reminder of the immediate and devastating impacts of deficiencies in forest policy and forest management. Fires were occurring in logged-over areas where poor logging techniques had left behind excessive amounts of flammable material. But even greater problems were created by the burning of the vegetation in the course of land clearing. Industrial corporations took advantage of the dry conditions to expand areas of oil palm and industrial timber plantations. Superimposed on this was a great expansion of land clearing by smallholder farmers who also took advantage of the dry conditions to consolidate their claims to land and expand the areas they could cultivate. Clearly, these problems were greatly exacerbated by the El Niņo but the fires were an inevitable consequence of policies that favoured non-forest use over forest use, and that failed to provide incentives for better quality logging.
It became rapidly clear to CIFOR’s scientists that the cost of these fires was borne mainly by rural people who depend upon the forest for their day-to-day existence. The fire problem reinforced our hypothesis that we must achieve balance in the allocation of land between agriculture, forestry and other users at the landscape level, and that management for timber must not compromise the environmental services provided by forests. The concept of forest ecosystem management that CIFOR has been advocating and researching are clearly part of the solution to the problems of fires in Southeast Asia.
The year closed with the meeting of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan. World leaders were brought together to debate climate change at a time when the El Niņo fires as well as extreme droughts and storms were jeopardising human welfare in many regions of the world. While the Kyoto conference was not primarily concerned with forests, it may have been the single most significant forestry event of 1997. The Kyoto Declaration implicitly recognised that all types of forests have to be managed in the context of national and global ecological considerations. Better conservation of forests alone cannot solve the problems of global warming. The critical issue is the excessive use of fossil fuels that ignores long-term environmental impacts. But what emerged from Kyoto was a clear international recognition that sustainable management of forests and expansions of forest cover is an integral part of the solution to the climate change problem. Significantly the need for international transfers of funds, to pay for the global environmental services of forests and to compensate for the development opportunities foregone by forest conservation, were accepted by the international community.
Over the past two decades, it sometimes seemed that progress in achieving acceptance of stewardship of all types of forests worldwide was painfully slow. The events of 1997 suggest that we are perhaps closer to achieving this than we had previously thought. It now seems likely that we will begin the third millennium with genuine partnership between the north and the south, the rich and the poor to manage forests in such a way that a balance is achieved between their local, regional and global benefits. One consequence of this should be that decisions will have to be made more on the basis of science than of special sectoral interests. This trend is expected to create an increased demand for CIFOR’s products. CIFOR is responding by targeting its research to the key areas of scientific uncertainty identified by international decision makers and by setting up mechanisms through electronic and printed media to disseminate our results. For example, our analysis of underlying causes of deforestation reaches hundreds of key people through the internet. Analysis of forest resource data is disseminated on CD-ROM. Our criteria and indicators research is linked to a number of international initiatives aimed at achieving sustainable forestry. Work on non-timber forest products and local institutions is providing new insights of value to numerous countries experimenting with devolution of management to local communities. Our biodiversity research is answering the questions posed by the Convention on Biological Diversity. New information on forestry options for low-potential sites is finding application in the vast areas of degraded lands in the tropics.
1997 was also the year in which CIFOR began to expand its presence in Africa and South America. We hope that one by-product of our greater physical presence in these areas will be increased involvement of scientists from these regions in international forestry issues.
In 1998 CIFOR looks forward to greater globalisation of our research, both in its conduct and its application, as well as to a rapid increase in our outputs and impacts as the research initiated in our first five years begins to yield results.
Jeffrey A. Sayer