Forests in sustainable development: a quick report card on progress since Rio

Report charting trends towards - and away from - sustainable forest management since the Earth Summit. The author highlights several positive trends such as the mainstreaming of participatory forestry approaches, growing consensus on sustainable management and significant clean up of forestry operations.

The authors also highlight a number of persistent trends not addressed in Rio or since. These include:

• Globalisation
• Privatisation
• Decentralisation
• No stable financial base for sustainable forest management.

Finally key challenges for the future are drawn out:

• Think and act beyond the forest sector – to make better progress on the underlying causes of forest problems and to realise potentials.
• Focus on criteria of ‘good forestry the last decade’s progress on ‘sustainable forest management’ criteria – especially for local governance
• Ensure that the current rapid development of markets for environmental services really works for the poor and for the security of other forest goods and services
• Start to define ‘responsible forest business’ from Southern and smaller enterprise perspectives, and not just in terms of what big Northern companies can do
• Close the glaring information gap on how forest assets are actually being used, to reduce the risk that progress in ‘pro-people’ and multi-benefit forest strategies merely ends up democratising forest degradation.

[adapted from author]

This paper is one of a series of papers from IIED in preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg 2002). More papers in the series available here.

NB: Report is no longer hosted on the publisher's website but has moved to http://www.ring-alliance.org.