Comparative analysis of indicators for sustainable forest management and its implication for of new evaluation indicators
Yumiko Wada and Ryosuke Shibasaki
Center for Spatial Information Science, University of Tokyo
7-22-1, Roppongi, Minato-Ku Tokyo 106-8558, Japan
Tel: (81)-3-3402-6231 Fax: (81)-3-3408-82628
E-mail : wada@skl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Abstract
The existing criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management developed by The Montreal Process, The Helsinki Process and so forth were compared. The comparative analysis revealed that the current available information on forest condition and its uses can not be used to judge spatially whether the forest use is sustainable or not. This implies an importance of spatial approach which integrate forest dynamic models and remote sensing data with GIS. The authors propose an additional indicators based on this approach to the criteria and indicators.
Introduction
Recently, the deforestation and resulting degradation has become a big issue in understanding Green House Gas (GHG) effect of the whole earth. It is important to arrive at a common methodology to evaluate the sustainable forest use and its management. Therefore, series of efforts for setting up a list of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management were made in The Montreal Process and The Hesinki Process and so forth. But there is no such indicator which can be used to judge whether the current forest use is sustainable or not and how much amount of or where timber production are possible under sustainable forest management practices. Also the indicator of sustainability fail to reflect the spatial variety, because they are defined using existing statistical data aggregate over regions. On the other hand, the development of the models- dynamic models of the forest ecosystem are becoming available to represent material flow and the accumulation as a process. Forest dynamic models enables to provide detailed spatial information which can not be obtained directly from forest statistics data.
It is our final goal to developing a sustainability evaluation system of forest use and management by integrating the models and remote sensing data with GIS. As a first stage, seven existing sustainability evaluation indicators were compared and their issue and limitations were clarified. Based on the analysis, new indicators are proposed and added to the existing ones.
Existing Indicators
The outline of the existing indicators are listed in table 1. as it can be seen from the table, the various processes/proposals are focused on forest in the different parts of the world. But, the basis of most of the features of these processes are derived from a common process. Before the UNCED conference, ITTO was the only existing process developing a set of indicators as a strategic guideline to address the issue of decrease in tropical forest areas. On the other hand, the indicators of other processes were developed by referring t The Montreal Process and The Helsinki Process.
| Name | Member nations | Target Forest | Contents |
| The Montreal Process (1995) | Temperate and boreal forest countries except for Europe (United States, Canada, Russia, Japan and so on. 12 countries) | Temperate and boreal forest except for Europe | Criteria and indicators for the conservation and sustainable management of temperate and boreal forest. |
| The Helsinki Process (1995) | European Countries | European Forest | European criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management |
| The Tarapoto Proposal(1995) | Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suranime and Venezuela signed the Amazonian Cooperation Treaty | Amazonian Forest | Criteria and indicators for the sustainability of the Amazonian Forest |
| The Dry Zone Africa Process (1995) | Dry Zone African Countries | Forests resources in western, eastern and southern dry zone Africa | Criteria and indicators for the sustainability of the forest in the Dry zone Africa. |
| The Central American Process (1996) | Central American Countries | Central American Forest | Criteria and indicators proposed for sustainability in forest of Central America |
| The Near East Process (1996) | Near East Countries | Near East Forest | Criteria and indicators proposed for sustainability in forest of Near East Asia. |
| ITTO Process (1991) | A tropical timber production country and consumption country | Tropical forest | Criteria for the Measurment of Sustainable Tropical Forest Management. |
Table 1. Outline of existing indicators
