What is Sustainable Forest Management? (SFM) SFM, particularly in its widest sense, is an ambiguous concept5. The lack of conceptual precision relates to various dimensions: • • • •
The question of what needs to be sustained? i.e., what should be the objectives of sustainable forest management? The values attached by different stakeholders to the various sustainable forest management objectives. The uncertainties associated with interventions in complex forest ecosystems. The time frame and spatial boundaries that should be adopted when examining the sustainability of different forest management options.
What should be sustained? In the past, most forest management systems tended to focus on one objective of overwhelming importance, such as the maintenance of a certain flow of timber, protection of a fragile watershed or provision of an attractive forest environment for outdoor recreation. However, this approach did not recognize that forests can produce a multitude of goods and services, frequently at the same time and from the same piece of forest land. Indeed, forests are the source of a diverse array of products, in addition to roundwood as a wide array of environmental services and offer opportunities for social and economic development. Normally, foresters have interpreted SFM as sustainable wood production, which continues to be the management objective of utmost importance in most cases. It is the only management system about which much evidence exists. This is a restrictive interpretation of the sustainable forest management concept i.e. the sustainable production of wood. This does not mean that other goods and services of forests are irrelevant, but that experience on their management is even more limited than in the case of sustainable wood production systems. Therefore, it is much more difficult to derive general conclusions for this broader but more imprecise concept of sustainable forest management. For example, non-wood forest products and forest services directly contribute to the livelihoods of some 300 million forest dependent peoples around the world. These products and services acquired great importance in the last few decades. Thus, the focus on single, or almost single, purpose management gave way to a much more complex objective of managing forest for multiple outputs. Managing forests in a way to maximize simultaneously all these objectives is impossible. The challenge for the achievement of sustainable forest management is that difficult choices must be made, and trade-offs must be considered. The questions facing forestry policy makers are:
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FAO 1999 Towards Sustainable Forest Management: an examination of the technical, economic, and institutional feasibility of improving management of the global forest estate. Arnoldo Contreras-Hermosilla FAO Consultant.
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