Sustainable Forestry

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), sustainable forestry may be defined as

There are four general goals of sustainable forest management (SFM): (1) to ensure a continuous supply of timber; (2) to ensure local populations’ access to a wide range of nontimber forest products; (3) to conserve natural forests for biodiversity, habitat, amenities, and ecosystem services; and (4) to sequester atmospheric carbon in support of climate change remediation. Strategies for pursuing SFM typically make the following assumptions:

• Forests will continue to regenerate naturally over the long term (more than one human generation).
• Forest resource stakeholders (from local communities to transnational timber companies) have sufficient technical knowledge, institutional capacity, and self-interest to manage natural forests for the long term.
• A clear policy framework for SFM exists that is consistent at various intergovernmental levels.
• A politically accountable public entity exists, with the capacity to effectively identify various forest resource stakeholders and consistently monitor their behavior over time.
• Market demand for products and access to markets are relatively stable over the long term.
• Forestland tenure (i.e., property ownership) is clearly delineated, and viable judiciary and police capabilities exist to justly enforce legitimate individual and collective property ownership rights to forest lands.

Despite regional variations, three common themes have emerged among the guidelines for SFM that distinguish it from its predecessor, sustained yield management: (1) a shift toward a more holistic perspective by changing the unit of analysis from the individual natural resource (e.g., timber or wildlife) to the larger ecosystem with which the resource is entwined; (2) a broadening of scope, from the economics and biology of renewable resource extraction to the social and cultural contexts in which such activities occur; and (3) an expansion in the range of benefits (products and services) provided, from timber for industrial wood production to timber and numerous different nontimber forest products and ecosystem services (carbon sequestration, soil and watershed protection) that SFM claims to provide.