Achieving The Sustainable Management Of Forests

This book discusses the reality of implementing sustainable forest management measures. Rather than simply offering theoretical descriptions, the book comprehensively details how sustainably managed forests can only be achieved through the cooperation and support of foresters, politicians, business leaders, local communities, consumers of forest-based goods and services, and the general public. The book also aims to raise public awareness of the factors involved in attaining the true sustainability of forest management, and the consequences of failing to do so, as well as the current issues facing sustainable forest management such as land ownership and land-use rights, political corruption, environmental stressors, and economic pressure. In 17 chapters, the book will appeal to academics and teachers in forestry and related areas, government practitioners, development agencies, and NGOs.

Although global rates of deforestation have started to decrease, they remain alarmingly high in many tropical countries. In light of this challenge, the growing importance of sustainable forest management (SFM) has been highlighted as a means for improving sustainability across the sector. Achieving sustainable management of tropical forests summarises and reviews the rich body of research on tropical forests and how this research can be utilised to make sustainable management of tropical forests a standard implementable strategy for the future. The book features expert discussions on the economic, political and environmental contexts needed for SFM to operate successfully, including coverage of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With its distinguished editors and international array of expert authors, Achieving sustainable management of tropical forests will be a standard reference for researchers in tropical forest science, international and national organisations responsible for protection and responsible stewardship of tropical forests, as well as the commercial sector harvesting and using tropical forest products.

A global assessment of potential and anticipated impacts of efforts to achieve the SDGs on forests and related socio-economic systems. This title is available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

This collection reviews the wealth of research on tropical forest management. Parts 1 and 2 explore key challenges facing tropical forests as well as the ecosystem services they deliver. Parts 3 and 4 review the management structures and techniques required for sustainable forest management (SFM). Part 6 includes case studies of SFM of different tropical forest types.

With more than three quarters of Canada's forests under provincial control, provincial forest policies are crucial for encouraging the sustainable management of the nation's forests. Forest tenures, which allow private companies to manage public forest resources, are the key policy tool that provinces use to balance the requirements of sustainable management with the economic concerns of the forest industry. By offering an up-to-date comparative examination of contemporary provincial forestry policies, this book provides forest managers, policy-makers, scholars, and students with the information and concepts to critically examine Canada’s complex forest tenure systems. The authors look at tenure, stumpage fees, and other forest practices to assess how well different provincial schemes achieve the goals of sustainable forest management. They identify a number of essential policy attributes that could be used to guide tenure reform, consider potential barriers that could prevent meaningful change, and offer much-needed practical guidance on overcoming these obstacles.

In recent decades, new scientific information has transformed our understanding of forest ecosystems, driving forest policy changes in both Canada and the United States. The extraction-oriented policies that dominated forest management for more than a century have given way to new approaches, leading often to acrimonious public debate, controversy over the interpretation of science, and frequent litigation by groups who support conflicting points of view. Today, the U.S. and Canada face a common challenge: to achieve a sustainable form of forest management that has wide public support. Many books discuss the scientific changes underlying forest policy, but this is the first to examine the social and economic aspects of sustainable forestry and the resulting impacts on resource policy in the two countries. The authors attempt to make sense of citizens' expectations for forests, and the responses by public-land managers and policymakers. Contributors include sociologists, research foresters, economists, political scientists, and geographers, as well as scholars in recreation and tourism. Together, their writings provide an in-depth interdisciplinary perspective on Canadian and U.S. efforts to manage public forests on a sustainable basis. The premise of "Two Paths toward Sustainable Forests is that academics and students, resource professionals, policymakers, and members of industry, environmental, and forest community groups can benefit from a comparison of the situations on either side of the border. By comparing the challenges of sustainable forestry and the different approaches adopted in Canada and the U.S., this book points the way towards potential solutions to common problems.

Forests represent a remnant wilderness of high recreational value in the densely populated industrial societies, a threatened natural resource in some regions of the world and a renewable reservoir of essential raw materials for the wood processing industry. In June 1992 the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro initiated a world-wide process of negotiation with the aim of ensuring sustainable management, conservation and development of forest resources. Although there seems to be unanimous support for sustainable development from all quarters, there is no generally accepted set of indicators which allows comparisons to be made between a given situation and a desirable one. In a recent summary paper prepared by the FAO Forestry and Planning Division, Ljungman et al. (1999) find that forest resources continue to diminish, while being called upon to produce a greater range of goods and services and that calls for sustainable forest management will simply go unheeded if the legal, policy and administrative environment do not effectively control undesirable practices. Does the concept of sustainable forest management represent not much more than a magic formula for achieving consensus, a vague idea which makes it difficult to match action to rhetoric? The concept of sustainable forest management is likely to remain an imprecise one, but we can contribute to avoiding management practices that are clearly unsustainable.