in the trenches/forests
7. On the Other Hand...
GOOD WOOD IS GOOD
by John Reid, Project Manager, Resource Economics Program, Conservation InternationalA headline in March 28 issue of the journal Science posed the question, "Is 'Good Wood' Bad for Forests?", referring to wood from tropical forests which is marketed in Europe and the U.S. as environmentally-friendly. The relevant question, however, is "What is good wood?", which begs the larger question, what kinds of changes should we, as environmentalists, be trying to bring about in the way loggers do business in tropical forests?
The conservation community has come to recognize that, sooner or later, despite our best efforts, vast areas of biologically rich rain forest are going to come under the chain saw. Extraction of timber will inflict serious damage on these ecosystems, and, in some cases, will pave the way for migrating farmers to clear the forest completely. In the face of this threat, one response has been an idea called sustainable forest management, a set of techniques by which foresters manipulate the forests so that commercially valuable trees grow faster, giving loggers a greater interest in protecting the forest so that they can reap valuable future harvests. Offer the logger higher prices by certifying his product as "green" and embody the practices of sustainable management in official policy and you have a powerful mechanism to stabilize wood production in permanent, almost-natural forests.
The idea was attractive because it would turn loggers from aggressors into stewards of nature, reducing the eventual protection burden that understaffed government agencies would have to shoulder. Further, criteria for green certification typically included a number of social and more explicit environmental requirements that, if implemented, would make commercial forestry into a model for corporate citizenship.
The response of all but a few tropical loggers has been, "Thanks, but no thanks," and not because they are mean, recalcitrant or unintelligent. On the contrary, they have proven a savvy lot, recognizing that long-term management is not in their own financial interest. The problem is that the manipulations they must make in order for the forest to grow faster cost more than the additional income they stand to receive in the future, and the green premium from certification is not large enough to close the gap.
Essentially, loggers are viewing money spent on increasing future harvests as long-term investments, and comparing them to returns they might get investing their money somewhere else. Trees, it turns out, don't grow fast enough to compete with other investments. Research by CI colleagues and others in Brazil, Bolivia and Guatemala showed unsustainable logging to be anywhere from 20 to 500 percent more profitable, depending on the forest and management prescriptions involved.
Financial considerations aside, sustainable management in some situations can do more damage to the forest than occurs under the status quo of unsustainable logging. More remote areas of the Amazon and other tropical wildernesses tend to be logged quite selectively, losing at most only a few trees per hectare (2.5 acres). Light logging is a function of the relatively high cost of bringing wood to market from remote locations; only the most valuable species are worth harvesting. Sustainable management, on the other hand, may aim to speed commercial tree growth, by way of heavier harvesting or weeding out species that don't have markets, both of which can do considerable ecological damage.
We need to underscore that in many forests and many management regimes, sustainable logging can reduce damage and, from an environmental viewpoint, is desirable. In particular, in more accessible forests -- near major roads or waterways -- loggers typically cut a wide variety of species unsustainably and do considerable violence to the forest. Low- cost changes in harvesting techniques that reduce overall damage and leave a more robust growing stock constitute a good investment, at least from a social, and sometimes even commercial perspective. Heavy-handed post-harvest silviculture, however, still may be environmentally counterproductive.
Low-impact harvesting is a positive step, but since loggers can't be expected to invest in future harvests and protect the woods from would-be slash-and-burn farmers, policy changes are needed to reduce that risk. Migration is often encouraged by the construction of roads into forested areas and official colonization assistance programs. These programs are important socially, but should be steered away from areas that still retain significant intact ecosystems and toward already settled regions.
Forest certification - though it affects only a sliver of the global tropical timber market - should be exploited to the fullest to encourage conservation of tropical forests. To do that, the focus of its currently wide-ranging criteria needs to be narrowed onto explicit conservation of forests' biological diversity. Companies should not always be required to engage in the economically -- and sometimes ecologically -- dubious enterprise of re- growing trees in natural tropical forests. The highest priority should perhaps be preserving representative reserves of untouched forest within areas that have been zoned for commercial logging. These set-asides don't guarantee that no species will be lost from a particular region, but they can substantially reduce the risk, and are simpler to monitor than technical rules about how logging is done.
Another strategy, already used to good effect in Ghana, Bolivia, Brazil and elsewhere, is to formally protect forests which have been lightly logged. This approach is no substitute for protecting untouched forests, and is clearly an idea that needs to be used selectively. Some forests have been hit far too hard to be worth the trouble. Others will be difficult to effectively protect (though protection may be no more impractical than on-the- ground imposition of unprofitable management rules). Nonetheless there are vast areas that have close to their original species composition, if not structure, and timely investments could protect these areas at minimal cost. Forests' market values fluctuate as economic conditions change and new species win favor in the market. Therefore, cost-effectiveness depends on taking advantage of the low phase of the forest's price cycle.
To close, a point of clarification is in order. These findings apply to tropical forests only. The set of promising options for reducing logging impacts in temperate forests will be different, and probably broader for at least three key reasons: First, governments over much of the temperate zones have a high degree of effective control over the management of public and even private lands, so complex, costly rules can actually be imposed on all timber producers. Second, interest rates in many of the temperate timber producing countries are lower than they are in most tropical countries, effectively lowering the rate of return that forestry investments need to achieve to compete. Finally, tropical forests are extremely complicated, with multitudes of different species whose regeneration requirements and ecological functions vary widely and are only dimly known. In the temperate zones, decades of research on much simpler ecosystems has produced a far sounder scientific basis that can guide our efforts to grow good wood.
THE CASE FOR CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT IN THE TROPICS
by Richard Z. Donovan, Director, SmartWood Program, Rainforest AllianceWood is a renewable resource that is in constant, and in many places growing, demand. Consumers and the forest industry should seek, wherever possible, to use wood in the most efficient way. However, if we can assume, at least for the sake of this discussion, that the demand for wood worldwide will remain at least at the current levels over the next 20 years, the question we all must face (as consumers and forest managers) is how will that wood be harvested? Furthermore, what can we do in the immediate future to ensure that commercial timber harvesters minimize the negative, and maximize the positive, ecological and socioeconomic impacts of their harvesting in the forest?
Independent forest management certification, such as that implemented by certifying organizations accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), rewards commercial forest managers who practice high standards of ecologically and socially responsible forestry; forestry that some day we may have the scientific evidence, experience and confidence to call sustainable. By giving certified companies a public seal of approval that can go on the products they sell, we are giving all consumers a chance to support more sustainable forestry.
Some in the scientific community, while acknowledging certification as a potentially viable tool for improving commercial forestry, are suggesting other conservation strategies that they believe to be more realistic as a tool for conserving biological resources. Certainly, certification is only one tool for forest conservation, and sole reliance on certification is a mistake that should not be made. However, before committing too many scarce resources to new and untested conservation strategies, we should first judge the accomplishments and potential of certified sustainable forestry itself.
To best explain the structure and function of certification in the light of current debates, this essay will focus on four questions being raised about the interplay between ecology, economics, and certified forestry.
1. Can certification techniques adequately ensure protection of biological resources and biodiversity?
FSC-accredited certification by itself will not resolve all biological conservation issues, but it does ensure that commercial forest managers must more consistently address biodiversity issues at landscape, stand and species levels. Certification should place a strong emphasis on conservation set-asides.
2. Given current economies, is there reason for commercial forest managers to practice certified sustainable forest management?
Currently, there are few or no incentives for forest managers to adopt certification or sustainable forest management techniques. The question is, how do we change this? Certification allows the public to make a choice about what type of forestry they want to support. Public demand for certified forest products could create adequate economic incentives for the adoption of sustainable forest management. Other strategies, such as that of "high grade and protect", represent short-term acceptance of the status quo, i.e. patently unsustainable logging, with the added step of buying and protecting the forest that has been degraded. Though this strategy is perhaps applicable in certain specific situations, adoption of this strategy sends a message to the forest industry that the status quo is acceptable when it is not.
3. Will sustainable forest management have more negative impacts than current logging practices in the tropics?
Forests are complex ecosystems which require management strategies which take account of their complexity and of socio-economic realities. Criticism has been leveled at sustainable forestry for promoting "clearcuts" in tropical forests in order to promote the regeneration of commercially valuable species. In truth, silvicultural research conducted on regeneration rates of mahogany and other species indicates that patch cuts (small clearcuts between 2-10 hectares, or in forester vernacular an "even-aged" management strategy) do appear to be necessary for regenerating a number of commercial timber species in tropical, temperate, and boreal forests. However, this does not imply the need for massive destructive clearcuts; nor should it be interpreted that certified sustainable forest management would force landowners or forest managers to implement broad scale, massive clearcutting.
4. Is there another strategy which may promise better protection of biological diversity in tropical forests than certified sustainable forestry? Is the idea of short-term high-grading of commercially valuable timber species, follow by purchase and strict protection of the high-graded forest, such a strategy?
There are many examples from around the world of forests that have been successively high-graded, each time for different species or smaller diameters of the same or new species, often over periods of tens, if not hundreds, of years. The legacy of these examples is degraded forests with low biological and commercial value, impoverishment of local communities and biological resources, and social and economic stress. Even if high-grading worked as a management strategy, how would high-graded forests then be effectively protected? Further, if both high-grading worked and protection endured, that is, the strategy was a success and more and more forests became off-limits to commercial forestry, how would human needs for wood be satisfied without drastic ecological impacts? These questions must be effectively answered before conservationists abandon their focus on the education and training of commercial forestry practitioners (e.g. loggers, foresters, landowners) and the public in the concepts of long-term ecologically sustainable forest management. Over the past ten years many new and innovative programs have begun all over the world focused on helping commercial forestry practitioners to improve their operations. These promising initiatives should not be short-circuited or discarded; rather we should build upon and improve them, and complement them with new tools.
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