Monitoring the fate of forests after the Rio earth summit

By Susan Archibald

One indirect result of the Rio summit was the establishment in 1993 of the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia. CIFOR monitors strategic development in forest research throughout the tropics. Over the next two months the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development will report to the Security Council on the progress that has been made since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. CIFOR's Director General, Dr. Jeff Sayer who will advise on the draft recommendations to the UN in a New York meeting next week shares his ideas.

Q: Five years have passed since the Rio summit. What has happened to the world's forests in that time?

A: I am sorry to say that we can't point to any dramatic change in the situation since Rio. Forests still continue to be degraded and cleared at an unsustainable and unacceptable rate. The problem is that there are limits to what the heads of state meeting can do to halt the process of forest destruction. The underlying causes of deforestation are very complex and many are deeply rooted in the broader problems of the developing world in the tropics. We can't expect to have sustainable forest management until we have legal systems that function properly, and we probably can't expect to conserve forests while we still have more than a billion people, mainly in tropical countries and many living from the forests, going to bed hungry every night.

Many people also think that progress in achieving more democratic governance would make an enormous difference in securing better use of natural resources. So a lot of skeptics are justified in saying that while bureaucrats and politicians talk about forest conservation the people in the forest continue to cut them down. But personally I think progress has been made. Many countries have taken initiatives to improve the management of their forests.

Q: What has changed in Indonesia over the last five years?

A: I think the ministry has made a big effort to encourage concessionaires to obey the regulations. There are still problems but there are also lots of areas where the standard of forestry practice in the field has considerably improved. The threat of shifting cultivators invading forest lands may also have declined over this time. As industrial employment becomes available there are fewer people forced to face the hardship of practicing slash and burn agriculture in remote areas. Another major innovation has been the huge investment in industrial timber plantations, mainly for the pulp industry. These have not been without their problems and the establishment of plantations has sometimes occurred at the expense of natural forest, but it will eventually mean that more timber can be produced from a smaller area relieving some of the pressure on natural forests.

Q: But some people say these industrial plantations are not sustainable, what is CIFOR's view on this?

A: Indonesian companies who are establishing these plantations are quite new to this sort of forestry. They are still learning their trade. There is no fundamental reason why these plantations should not be sustainable, although at CIFOR we think big companies will need to invest much more heavily in research if they are going to achieve the sorts of yields required to make their operations viable. There is also serious risk of disease and problems with maintaining the yields of these forests over time. CIFOR has major international research projects addressing these issues and we hope that we can provide some of the answers for Indonesian producers.

Q: Conservationists often feel that plantations and forests logged for timber will not be good for wildlife. What about meeting Indonesia's commitments under the biodiversity convention?

A: Forests logged to a high standard still retain a lot of their biodiversity. CIFOR and its research partners have been researching reduced impact logging techniques and if these are adopted on a broad scale then the production forest could play an important role in conserving biodiversity. But it is still necessary to have large areas which are protected against human disturbance, so it is a matter of urgency to improve the standard of management of national parks and nature reserves in Indonesia.

The Indonesian government has many projects tackling this issue but most of them haven't been operating long enough for us to be able to judge their impact. It is still proving difficult to solve the social and economic problems of reconciling the protection of parks and reserves with the needs of the communities that live around them. Ultimately you need tough regulations to protect high priority areas. And this requires a high level of commitment from the government.

Q: There seem to have been endless international meetings to discuss forests in the five years since Rio. Do these meetings really contribute to solving the problems?

A: I have to participate in a lot of these meetings and I sometimes wonder just how useful they are. Sometimes you feel as though you are not really getting anywhere. But these meetings do keep forest conservation on the political agenda and I think that over the last five years they have resulted in a much better understanding of the real issues. The Inter-governmental Panel on Forests has commissioned a number of technical studies on important international forest conservation issues and the results of these studies have fed into the political process. One benefit is much less polarization of attitudes on forest issues today.

Even the most radical NGO's recognize that you can't conserve forests if you don't address the needs of the hundreds of millions of poor people who live in or around the forests. Similarly even the most hard headed businessman recognizes that, as we move into the 21st century, we can't ignore issues of social equity and environmental sustainability. So I believe that the discussions since Rio have done a lot to bring the two parties together. CIFOR's view is that you can't solve the problems of the world's forests by putting a fence around them and putting them off limits to any human activity. The solution has to retain its environmental and biodiversity values.

Q: But surely the private sector will always put its profit motives first?

A: Yes it is inevitable. But increasingly consumers want to see products labeled as to their origin and will buy accordingly. So for at least a small part of the market, eco-labeling of products should provide a motivation for the private sector to improve its performance. But ultimately you have to have good quality enforcement of regulations so that the only profitable way for the private sector to operate is a sustainable way. We at CIFOR definitely see risks in the increasing control of the forestry sector by multi-national corporations who are free to operate anywhere in the world where conditions suit them. But we are also cautiously optimistic about the private sector beginning to play a much more positive role. We think that shareholders will want to be assured that their companies are not just stripping assets and that the operations are sustainable economically. This means that they have to be sustainable environmentally.

Q: What would you like to see happen as a result of the discussions in New York over the next few weeks?

A: Together with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, CIFOR will table a paper at the Inter-governmental Panel on Forests meeting in New York next week urging the panel to give more attention to the issue of strengthening forest research. When the world has been confronted with other major problems, such as climate change and AIDS, it has responded by establishing major well-funded international research programs to study the underlying problems.

In forestry we are still struggling with hopelessly inadequate information and in many of the 40 or 50 countries where CIFOR collaborates, the national research systems are underfunded and understaffed. We need to put the same sort of effort into forestry research that we put into agricultural research to achieve the Green Revolution 20 years ago.

We have major well-funded international programs studying the problems of climate change and we need something similar for forests. This will not be just conventional forestry research. We need a new culture of forestry research looking at the fundamental underlying problems of sustainable forestry.

And to solve these problems you need to mobilize not just foresters but social scientists, ecologists and political scientists.

Q: What will the world's forest look like in 50 years time if the UNCED processes succeed?

A: CIFOR believes it has been a mistake to focus conservation efforts on conserving as much forest as possible. We need to have scientific answers to the questions of how much forest we need in order to conserve the world's biodiversity and provide all the environmental services, as well as the industrial products, forests provide.

So it is not a question of how much forest but rather of the quality of forest and where it is located. We need to have quite large extents of totally protected forests in those areas which are most important for biodiversity. We also need to have large areas of forest for environmental services, but in most cases these can safely be exploited for timber and many non-timber forest products without major danger to the environment.

And we are going to see a major increase in industrial plantations to produce timber and pulpwood to supply most of the fiber needs of the world's growing economies. So even though the actual amount of forest that is retained is important, overall we are more concerned with quality and location.

Q: And what do you think about the prospects for an International Convention on Forests?

A: My own prediction is that the UN General Assembly will decide that there should be a continuation of international negotiations on forest issues and that within a few years these will lead to some form of international legally binding code addressing forest issues.

I think it would be a mistake to believe that problems will be solved the day we sign an agreement. But I do think that it is essential the international discussions initiated over the last few years be maintained, and if an agreement can be reached which establishes broadly accepted ground rules for forest management throughout the world, then this would certainly be a major step forward.

But an agreement is not an end in itself -- it is just part of the continuing process of moving towards managing the forests of the earth as a global resource and recognizing that their importance goes far beyond the immediate localities where they grow.