The above refers. Thank you. Nelson Wong MTC
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 16:42:44 +0100 (BST)
> From: Palmer & Marshall <tropical.forestry@rmplc.co.uk>
> Subject: Palmer final paper for UBC-UPM Conference on Certification
> X-Sender: tropical@mail.rmplc.co.uk
> To: Nelson Wong <nelson@mtc.com.my>
> Message-id: <2.2.16.19960822152904.32471076@mail.rmplc.co.uk>
MIME-version: 1.0
To: Nelson Wong
From: Mary Marshall
Date: 22 August 1996
Please find as an attachment, John Palmer's final draft of his paper for the
UBC-UPM Conference on Certification, which he completed and sent to UBC
while he was in Guyana.
The file name is UBC-UPM.RP3. It is in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which can
be retrieved as a Word file.
Best regards,
Mary Marshall
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Attachment inserted here (~38 pages) 2495 lines, 16255 words
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John Palmer and Mary Marshall
3 Beechcroft Road, Summertown, Oxford OX2 7AY, U.K.
telephone: [UK +44] Oxford (0 1865) 554 004; fax: (0 1865) 311 505
E-mail tropical.forestry@rmplc.co.uk
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FINAL DRAFT
Monitoring forest practices
Invited paper for Topic 1 - The basis for certification
Part A - Ecological for Economic, Social and Political Issues in
Certification of Forest Management
UBC-UPM Conference on Certification
12-16 May 1996, Kuala Lumpur (Putrajaya, Kajang), Malaysia
J. R. Palmer, D. Curtin and C. Graham
final draft, updated 28 July 1996
Sponsored by the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia
and the Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, Serdang
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Registered in England no.2888992
VAT registration no.630 6574 46
Registered office : St.John's House, 5 South Parade,
Summertown, Oxford OX2 7JL, U.K.
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Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction - the case of BSE
Monitoring to satisfy whose interests ?
Audiences for forest monitoring
Commercial processors and retailers of forest products
Consumer and environmentalist organizations
The general public
Indigenous and traditional peoples
Forest operators
Other stakeholders
Spatial and temporal scales of stakeholder interests
Frequency of monitoring
Anticipated detail in monitoring
Assurance of credibility
Communicating the results of monitoring
What to monitor for the different stakeholders ?
Monitoring the forest for national/international statistical reporting
Monitoring for the forest owner and manager
Components of the forest management system
Norms for indicators
Characteristics and examples of indicators
Monitoring with remote sensors
Snapshots versus trends
Costs of monitoring
Priority setting or weighting among criteria and indicators
Problem of non-equivalence
Hazard analysis by critical control points
Analysis of criteria and/or indicators in relation to the
certification decision
Research needs for improved monitoring
References
Annex 1 - Some characteristics and selection criteria for indicators
Annex 2 - Tracing of supplies from the global market by Timbmet Ltd., U.K.
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UBC-UPM Conference on Certification
12-16 May 1996, Kuala Lumpur (Putrajaya, Kajang), Malaysia
Sponsored by the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia
and the Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, Serdang
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Invited paper for Topic 1 - The basis for certification
Part A - Ecological
for
Economic, Social and Political Issues
in Certification of Forest Management
Monitoring forest practices
---------------------------
John R Palmer
Tropical Forest Services Ltd., Oxford OX2 7AY, U.K.
Daniel Curtin
Independent consultant, Oxford, U.K.
Catherine Graham
Group Environmental Coordinator, Timbmet Ltd., Oxford OX2 9PP, U.K.
Abstract
Consumer-responsive or treaty/convention-obligated
certification requires mutual reciprocity of recognition,
which in turn requires equivalence in the indicators whose
values contribute to the certification decision.
Reciprocity requires also equivalence in the audit
procedures for verification of the operation of forest
management systems; well established principles of
accreditation facilitate equivalence in audits. The forest
stewardship standards which are currently in operation or
under development have excessive numbers of criteria and
indicators of the quality of forest management. Evaluation
indicators should be separated from forest-specific checks
on the implementation of management prescriptions.
Indicators should be as globally relevant and as comparable
as possible, while being meaningful and relevant at the
level of the local forest management unit. Procedures for
assimilating indicator values to derive a Yes/No forest
certification decision need improvem! ent to reduce the
influence of subjective judgements and to increase
transparency of the decision-making process. An
incremental approach to globally relevant indicators should
first aim to satisfy consumer expectations.
Note
In this paper, Standards (with an initial capital S) and
FSS (forest stewardship standards) mean a designed set of
principles, criteria, indicators and norms for assessment
of the quality of forest management, or at least some
combination of this hierarchical set. 'Good forest
stewardship' is preferred in this paper to 'sustainable
forest management', because the latter can only be assessed
retrospectively
Introduction - the case of BSE
This paper was prepared during an unprecedented
agricultural crisis in Britain. A fatal neurological
disorder, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), has been
caused by feeding cattle with rations compounded from a
huge variety of organic substances, including cardboard and
the carcases of sheep which died of the scrapie brain
disease, as well as carcases of cattle which died with
rather similar symptoms. There are fears that a small
proportion of human consumers of beef and beef products
from animals affected by BSE may contract Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease (CJD), a somewhat similar and fatal affliction of
the human brain. The sale and use of cattle feed
containing ruminant protein was banned after July 1988.
However, the consumption by cattle of old stocks of that
compound feed has continued for years afterwards, because
the risks involved were not sufficiently appreciated.
The nature of BSE is complex and difficult to research. To
have applied the "precautionary principle" when BSE was
first associated with compounded rations would have caused
an outcry by farmers because of the increased cost of
feeding cattle. The chain of cause and effect was too
weakly understood to make a convincing scientific case for
a ban on such rations in the face of financial arguments
for no ban.
While research was being conducted on BSE, links between
veterinary and human health monitoring were too weak to
allow rapid detection of possible transmission to humans.
When that possibility was admitted, the consequences for
public health caused diverse reactions. On the one hand,
governments have initiated a variety of controls, and the
European Commission imposed a world-wide ban on the sale of
British beef. The cost of loss of business, including
international trade, runs into astronomical figures.
The reactions of consumers in Europe have been
interestingly different, depending on distinct views of
risk. The announcement of a possible link between BSE and
CJD in Britain was followed by a very sharp fall in sales
of beef and readily identifiable beef products.
Supermarkets which halved the retail price of beef reported
a rapid recovery in sales. Supermarkets which have short
supply chains and tight control over the production methods
of farmers have been able to retain a high proportion of
their normal sales. Shops which can advertise beef as
coming from healthy herds reared on a diet of natural
forage and cereal have also lost only a small proportion of
their normal sales. There does not seem to have been any
switch in consumer purchasing behaviour, from cheap beef
derived from animals reared on compound feeds to more
expensive beef reared on natural grassland and forage. On
the continent of Europe, sales of beef have fallen by about
50 per cent in Germany and 4! 0 per cent in Italy, even
though the reported incidence of BSE has been extremely
small (a total of 129 animals in Switzerland, 67 in France,
and lesser numbers in other countries; this is very much a
"British" disease). Smaller declines in dairy products and
beef sales have been noted elsewhere in Europe.
One might expect that organic cattle farmers would stand to
gain a large market share from the conventional producers
of dairy and beef products. However, terms of trade are
still significantly stacked against the organic farmers.
In Britain, conventional producers using compound feeds for
their animals receive substantial government grants, much
larger than for those operating to organic standards.
Organic meat producers may obtain a "green premium" of
perhaps 10 per cent on the farm gate price but the major
difference is in the retail price. Retailers explain the
large difference in premium between farmgate price and
retail price by the small volumes of organic farm produce
and consequent lack of economies of scale, extra transport
costs, and higher wastage due to shorter shelf life and a
higher proportion of visually unacceptable produce. The 10
percent "green premium" is a poor stimulant to most
farmers, compared with the relatively generous subsidies
available to c! onventional farmers through the operation
of the European Common Agricultural Policy, There is no
evidence that British supermarkets, which in effect
determine the retail prices for food, will improve the
premium which they offer to organic producers.
The case of BSE and organic farming is cited here because
it emphasises the paradoxes of evaluations of, and
responses to, risk at the family and government levels.
There are weaker but probably instructive parallels in
sustainable forest management. Because so little is still
known about the long-term effects of forest management
regimes on ecosystem functions, ideally the more intensive
regimes should be more intensively monitored. But
monitoring is expensive, the relative value of forest
products is low compared with cattle, and risks to
ecosystems are naturally perceived as less critical than
risks to human health. Choice of what to monitor in the
forest is thus difficult. The precautionary principle
implies that we should do more monitoring when uncertainty
is high, while forest operators argue that conservative and
monitoring should not have negative impacts on their costs;
exactly as the British cattle farmers argued.
The BSE case introduces this background paper because it
illustrates the different responses of veterinary and
medical scientists, farmers, food retailers, politicians
and the general public to a superficially simple epidemic
in cattle with a single identified cause and a
superficially simple solution. As knowledge increases
about the subtleties of the disease and its actual and
potential ramifications, so the implicit needs for
monitoring, and analysis of returns from monitoring,
increase enormously. As human health may be at risk, there
is not currently much scrutiny of the costs of the control
measures and long-term monitoring which will be required.
It would be unreasonable to expect the same tolerant
attitude to rocketing costs when forest practices are being
monitored.
The BSE case is also relevant to this UBC-UPM conference
because it shows the hazards of delaying action. There is
considerable evidence that controls on cattle feeding
practices were postponed because scientists could not prove
a connection between neurological disorders in cattle and
in humans. Trying to "get all of the science right" before
making policy decisions was, in this case, a fatal
approach. Moreover, in relation to forestry, it is an
unhistorical approach. If Dietrich Brandis had not taken
an incremental approach in India in the 1850s, making
conservative extrapolations from forest management
practices in Europe, who knows how long formal management
of tropical forests would have been delayed.
We should be aiming to transform forest practices from
CATNAP (currently available technology narrowly avoiding
prosecution) to BATNEEC (best available technology not
entailing excessive costs); we are not inventing these
terms, they are well known in quality assurance systems.
Monitoring to satisfy whose interests ?
Certification is a market process, not an academic
exercise. This background paper is concerned principally
with independent, third-party audit and voluntary
certification of the quality of forest management at the
level of the local forest management unit (LFMU). The
paper does not deal with inter-governmental reporting
schemes such as the Helsinki and Montreal Processes or the
FAO Global Forest Assessment, or with whole-country
certification. This last idea is unacceptable to consumer
and environmentalist groups, precisely because of notorious
failures of national forest services in the past and the
public perception that they cannot be impartial,
disinterested evaluators of what they should be regulating
anyway. Moreover, as quality of forest management is not
(yet) linked directly to public health & safety, there is
no obvious reason why government should intervene in
market-mediated decisions (contrast GATT Uruguay Round's
Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Mea! sures - see
paper by Markku Simula in this volume). The background
paper is also not concerned with high-specification FSS for
the "boutique" market.
Audiences for forest monitoring - commercial processors
and retailers of forest products
>From the 1980s, at least, surveys of public opinion have
>indicated an expressed willingness to pay substantially
>above the ruling price for products which come from
>forests under environmentally-sensitive management (MORI
>1990, Gerstman & Meyers 1991, Botting 1994). If the whole
>of that extra value were to be returned intact to the
>forest producers, the amount would be ample to pay for a
>vast improvement in the quality of forest management (OFI
>1991). Unfortunately, the morally sensitive response to
>pollsters is not confirmed by surveys of actual purchasing
>behaviour. Buyers for home improvement/DIY
>(Do-It-Yourself) sheds would pay a small premium if they
>could be sure of the forest management quality and the
>security of the chain of custody. In contrast, the policy
>of builders' merchants was to source from the cheapest
>supplier for a given quality of timber (Botting 1994).
We concentrate on the commercial users of forest products
(such as construction companies) and on retailers, because
information about the views of primary processors is
sparse. The sawmillers who responded to the unpublished
Soil Association/Trees for People study on chains of
custody in the Black Forest of Germany in 1995,
commissioned by the European Commission, tended to adopt a
wait-and-see attitude. The enterprises which dealt direct
with consumers were more positive about certification but
lacked knowledge of what they might monitor in the supply
forests.
The usual explanation for the more positive attitude is
that the home improvement/DIY sheds are closer, and must be
more responsive, to the demands of the final consumers,
while the builders' merchants are often small and
traditional companies, and separated by one or more links
in the marketing chain from the final consumer. The home
improvement/DIY businesses tend to be relatively new
companies, large, image conscious, and increasingly having
public policies of commitment to ethical business. These
policies or ethical charters often contain commitments
against purchases from suppliers which are ecologically and
socially irresponsible. Negative factors mentioned in the
ethical charters of major U.K. companies include: use of
child labour or forced prison labour; discrimination in
recruitment of workers against women and local people; lack
of respect for the claims and rights of indigenous and
traditional peoples; production processes which are
environmentally insensitive! polluting, or wasteful of raw
materials or energy. Some companies also subscribe to the
principles of fair trade: promotion of sustainable
development by helping supplier enterprises in developing
countries to be more successful; educational campaigns to
explain to consumers how they can make a difference by
selective purchases; and promotion of more equitable terms
of trade between suppliers and buyers.
Influence is brought to bear on the commercial companies by
publicity campaigns mounted by consumer and
environmentalist groups, including contact with and through
members of the Boards of Directors and shareholders.
Positive signals can be sent by selective purchase of the
products of ethical companies and purchase of their stocks
and shares. Negative signals can be sent by unfavourable
publicity, boycotts and sale of shares. Businesses
subscribing to ethical charters are particularly influenced
by the opinions of consumer and environmental journalists
working for the major broadsheet newspapers.
Companies which take an ethical stance involve themselves
necessarily in substantial extra commitments to monitor
both their internal procedures and processes, as well as
those of their suppliers. Most companies promoting an
ethical charter state that it is simply a formalization of
their obligations under the implicit Social Contract
between the private sector and the general public. They
acknowledge that they hope it will be good for business,
mainly in terms of market share, much less in terms of
"green premium". The ever-increasing volume of health and
safety regulation in the European Union, and the monitoring
obligations which that legislation implies, lessens the
additional voluntary burden implicit in an ethical business
stance.
Nevertheless, private sector companies such as those in the
WWF-UK's 1995 Plus Group and Timbmet have found it no easy
task to apply ethical principles to their practices and
suppliers of forest products. As a first step, the
companies have tried to identify the exact production
locations of the forest products which they use or sell.
Annex 2 describes the timber tracing process developed by
Timbmet, which is Europe's largest importer of hardwood.
Timbmet draws from a continuously fluctuating pool of about
200 direct suppliers, which fan out to a potentially
enormous number of primary sources.
Tracing the origin of the forest product is clearly an
important stage in being able to respond to the concerns of
consumer and environmentalist individuals and
organizations. That increasing numbers of major commercial
enterprises do respond to public concerns is shown by the
coincidence between the demands of consumer and
environmentalist pressure groups and the companies' ethical
charters. Tracing is at least theoretically possible for
any purchaser, through the chains of purchase orders and
invoices, and is within the administrative expertise of
most companies. Responding to other concerns involves
local and specialist knowledge which is normally not
available within the purchasing enterprise.
In order to verify the technical assurances provided by
suppliers, purchasers traditionally use the services of
third-party certification bodies. "Third-party" means that
the certification body is not associated directly with
either the supplier ("first-party") or the purchaser
("second-party"), and does not have a stake, or stand to
benefit financially, from either a positive or a negative
result of the audit. The particular reason why purchasers
do not turn to government agencies for verification of the
suppliers's assurances about forest products is because
most governments have a stake in the outcome. Nearly all
governments have some kind of legislation governing forest
harvesting. Most governments have legislation covering
many other aspects of forest land use and production
systems. The legislation is often acknowledged to be
inadequate and to be only partly implemented, but citation
of specific examples is often embarrassing to the
responsible government agencies! Consumer and
environmentalist organizations thus do not trust the
impartiality of government audits, and hence the interest
in third-party services.
Paradoxically, the need for public confidence in
third-party certification bodies brings in governments at a
different level. Accreditation of certification bodies may
be conducted by an authority established by mutual consent
between certification bodies and other stakeholders, or by
governments themselves. More usually, governments set the
frameworks within which accreditation authorities or
agencies must operate.
Audiences for forest monitoring - consumer and
environmentalist organizations
The similarity of the demands or expectations of consumer
and environmentalist organizations with the policy
statements in the ethical charters of commercial companies
is an indication of the influence which the pressure groups
can exert. One can also interpret the similarity as the
commercial companies allowing the pressure groups to do the
companies' thinking for them, especially in areas where the
commercial companies naturally lack expertise. Whether the
thinking is adopted or not is largely determined by the
cost of implementation. Demands which fit easily with
better business practices are obviously more likely to be
adopted than those which require much extra effort and
cost. The WWF-UK 1995 Plus Group exemplifies the success
of a gradualist approach to the promotion of certification,
fostered by an environmentalist group. This approach
merged with changes to business practice in response to
awareness of the commercial benefits of positively
addressing consumer interests. The 62 member companies of
this group, representing some 20 per cent (US$ 3 billion
annually) of the U.K. trade in forest products, have agreed
to purchase wood and wood products after December 1999 only
from forests which are certified to be managed in
accordance with the principles and criteria of the Forest
Stewardship Council.
The non-government (NGO) consumer and environmentalist
organizations range from the most extreme preservationist
to the liberal near-centrist. Action-minded organizations
such as Greenpeace capture media attention but are often
too extreme to attract a supportive base in either commerce
or science. The broader base and greater knowledge of more
mainstream groups such as the Audubon Society, Friends of
the Earth, Sierra Club and World Wide Fund for Nature
(World Wildlife Fund in the USA) allow easier interaction
with government and commercial circles, because they are
perceived to adopt a less threatening approach.
Those involved directly in forest management may object to
the simplification of particular concerns to a set of
simple slogans or sound bites. However, experience in many
fields shows that such simplification is necessary to
overcome natural inertia to change, especially when real
needs are comprised of factors which are not easily grasped
by non-specialists. The commitments in ethical charters
are single-phrase or single-sentence distillates of often
complex issues, condensed to essentials which can be
grasped by shareholders, company directors and politicians.
One strength of successful consumer and environmentalist
organizations is their ability to blend professional
understanding of subject matter with an appreciation of
what and how much the non-specialist can appreciate and
support.
The importance of consumer and environmental journalists in
influencing the behaviour of commercial enterprises has
been noted above. The primary contacts for the journalists
are usually the consumer and environmental NGOs, not those
engaged in forestry research or forest operations. Public
understanding of forest monitoring procedures, and the
results of monitoring, thus tends to be mediated through
two layers of communication. Ensuring that the NGOs
understand the choice of monitoring procedures, and the
limitations on interpretation of the results of monitoring,
is a major task for forest operators.
Audiences for forest monitoring - the general public
NGOs have to be careful to maintain the interest of their
subscribers by constant repetition of threats which (only)
they, the NGOs, can counteract. However, the threat must
not appear so remote or generalized that the supporter
feels emotionally detached. Although a subscribing
supporter of a NGO is probably better informed than the
general public, public understanding of forest problems
appears to be quite limited. Casual interviews by U.K.
radio and television reporters with the
"person-in-the-street" and with politicians about forest
problems suggest that the following social and
environmental aspects are important:
social -
- the claims and rights of indigenous groups should
be respected, and their traditional ways of life
should be sustainable;
- employees in forest operations should enjoy the
same legal rights and protection for employment,
health and safety as in any urban industry;
environmental -
- there should be no, or minimal, use of persistent
pesticides and other artificial organic and
inorganic chemicals, such as fertilizers;
- water flows and water quality should be "tap water
clear";
- no visible soil erosion or sedimentation;
- no burning, or only traditional burning in small patches;
- forest landscapes should appear as continuous cover
or parkland from a distance, but not so thick that
the casual walker might lose sight of his/her car;
- freedom to roam, and an abundance of gently graded,
well marked and signposted paths;
- stands should be heavily thinned or naturally open,
and regeneration should be by single-tree or patch
clearings, not by clear felling;
- there should be an abundance of "charismatic
megafauna", brightly coloured and easy to see (but
not dangerous) wildlife; biodiversity should be
conserved or enhanced;
- in peri-urban forests and tourist areas,
information centres with simple literature and
signboards should be complemented by knowledgeable
ranger staff to interpret the forest.
Very obviously, this is an urban-centric, non-industrial
view of the forest, derived largely from the television and
cinema screen and to be expected in an increasingly
urbanised world. Some of the concerns and preferences are
contradictory. Most of the preferences are shared by
professional foresters, although they would be expressed in
different terms. Some of the preferences, such as blanket
opposition to clear felling and burning, are based on lack
of knowledge about the variety of regeneration processes in
the natural state.
It will be evident from the list above that interest is
mostly in the state of the forest, as reflecting the
outcomes of forest practices, rather than in the forest
practices themselves. This is generally true in all
monitoring systems and for all classes of stakeholder. It
is, however, only partly true if the operation of an
environmental management system (EMS) is being audited,
when the process may be as important as the outcome. The
emphasis in EMS on policies and procedures permits some
judgement about the commitment of a forest operator to
quality of forest management in the future. This aspect of
good forest stewardship cannot be checked if the monitoring
system is concerned only with the current outcomes of
forest management practices in the past.
Audiences for forest monitoring - indigenous and
traditional peoples
The third numerically-major group of stakeholders (i.e.,
those with a legitimate interest or stake in the outcome of
forest management activities) are the indigenous and
traditional peoples. These peoples have more or less
strong spiritual attachments to the forests in their home
ranges, as well as more or less strong dependence on forest
goods and services for subsistence and income. Much
attention has been devoted by anthropologists and social
scientists to identifying and categorising the value
systems, needs and expectation of the often marginalized
indigenous and traditional peoples. By far the prominent
issue in common between groups is the security of
inter-generational access rights to forest resources.
Stronger dependence on the forest is associated with
greater need for legal protection against the dilution of
resource rights and against the transfer of these rights to
other communities. In general, measures which favour the
conservation of deep-forest species ! of plants and animals
favour also the indigenous and traditional peoples.
Although numerically strong in global total, the indigenous
and traditional peoples are often politically weak and
socially marginalized. Pierce Colfer (1995) and Pierce
Colfer et al. (1995) developed a six-dimensional framework
within which forest dependency and influence over the
forest could be assessed. However, the major influence
exerted by these stakeholders is the de facto power to
clear the forest for farming, either temporarily for
rotational agriculture or permanently for settled cropping.
Audiences for forest monitoring - forest operators
Owners and managers of forest enterprises, and their
contractors, do not comprise a homogeneous group. Some
larger operators have extensive series of long-term sample
plots to monitor tree growth and forest yield, and may also
monitor water quality and population dynamics of wildlife.
Such operators may provide encouragement and logistic
support to observational and experimental research on the
effects of different forest management regimes.
At the other end of the scale, there are more or less
legally approved operators whose interests are simply in
mining of the forest resource at least possible cost. They
will often have good reasons for opposing any form of
monitoring.
Audiences for forest monitoring - other stakeholders
Other forest stakeholders are, numerically, much less
important than the five groups described above (commercial
entities at the consumer end of the processing and
marketing chain, consumer and environmental groups, the
general public, indigenous and traditional peoples, and
forest operators or producers). The other stakeholders
include policy makers at national and international levels;
legally potent government services; hydroelectric power
managers; and environmental tourists. The stakeholder
groups are by no means discrete. A person may be a
government forester during the working week, an
environmental activist at the weekend and an eco-tourist on
holiday.
Spatial and temporal scales of stakeholder interests
The spatial and temporal dimensions of interests in the
forest obviously vary greatly between the stakeholder
groups. Indigenous and traditional groups are concerned
about the inter-generational durability of resource rights
over forests in their home ranges. Loggers and other
harvesters think about the concessions which they rent from
the legal forest owners, often for short periods and with
scant security of tenure. Commercial processors of forest
products may take the whole world as their supply base,
seeking the cheapest source for a given technical
specification; regular and long-term bulk supplies of
reliable quality may be more important than short supply
chains. Government forest services have to take a
long-term and national view in applying an increasing
volume of complex legislation, some of which flows from
international agreements such as the Framework Convention
on Biological Diversity. Other government departments may
take a short-term view of forests as ! land banks to
relieve the pressure of excess human populations, as dumps
for toxic wastes, and as potential reservoirs for
hydropower schemes. Consumer and environmentalist
organizations will tend to take long-term and
geographically broad approaches to forest management but
will often focus on specific short-term issues and
particular localities for campaigning reasons.
Frequency of monitoring
The brief review of forest stakeholders and their different
interests indicates the great variety in the amount of and
kind of monitoring of forest change which would be required
to respond adequately to each category. During the
colonial period, British foresters and their national
colleagues spent much effort in devising a set of standard
reporting forms (BEFC 1948). These forms were used in
annual state and national reports and in the approximately
quinquennial Commonwealth Forestry Conferences. The forms
summarised changes in areas by forest types and
administrative divisions, concession areas granted and
operated, progress on management planning, annual
outturn/exports/imports by main types of products,
information on forest revenue and expenditure. Other forms
gave details of quantities of and taxes levied on marketed
non-wood forest products, and of reported offences against
forest regulations, forest fire occurrences, etc. The
national returns were compiled thro! ugh a simple
hierarchical administrative system devised for the Indian
Forest Service in the 1800s but having its origins in Roman
times.
Area information was derived from surveys on foot until
aerial photographs were introduced in the 1920s.
Monitoring of forest quality was not attempted because of
the difficulty of devising standard scales and the paucity
of baseline information except in experimental areas. In
spite of great improvements over the last several decades
in the techniques for monitoring forests, publication of
regular annual reports by national forest services has
become a rarity in many countries.
The need to reintroduce elementary national reporting, to
demonstrate progress towards the Year 2000 Objective of the
International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), has led
to the development of the more complex and detailed forest
resource accounting - FRA (IIED and WCMC 1994). FRA
includes concepts of quality and condition assessment.
IIED and WCMC point out that FRA reporting could be
developed from the level of the individual forest upwards,
or from whole-country overviews downwards. Frequency of
monitoring would depend on need, but it was anticipated
that there would be annual national-level returns to the
International Tropical Timber Council on progress towards
the Year 2000 Objective. Uptake of FRA seems to be slow,
partly because it is not obviously associated with
incentives. The IIED/WCMC reports on FRA do not prescribe
any methodology or minimum standards; FRA is simply a
reporting system.
Annual and quinquennial reports providing snapshots or
summarising trends are obviously useful for government
planning and inter-governmental reporting (for example, as
part of the post-UNCED process), but cannot easily reflect
the diversity between forests or pick out trends which are
important in any one forest. Many of the suggestions for
items to be included in FRA have re-appeared in the
criteria and indicators of forest management for the
Helsinki and Montreal inter-governmental reporting systems.
The FRA suggestions parallel also the concerns of the
general public which were listed above.
Forest owners and managers will require, for their own
business accounting, more detailed monitoring of the
implementation of the forest management system. Those who
receive grant subsidies or tax incentives will normally be
required to submit annual returns to the
grant-administering agency. This agency is often the
national forest service, and these returns aid the
compilations necessary for statistical reporting to the
political administration and in respect of
inter-governmental obligations. More detailed reporting
may be required at the end of one grant cycle (3-5 years)
or before the start of another cycle.
Purchasers of forest products, from processors to
consumers, and non-consumptive users such as tourists, book
readers and cinema-goers, are usually seeking frequent but
generalised reassurance about the quality of forest
management. Indigenous and traditional peoples also seek
frequent reassurance, but with respect to particular
products and services and particular locations. Local
NGOs, and national/international NGOs running local
campaigns, are more likely to want the same spatial and
temporal degree of monitoring as an active forest manager.
Anticipated detail in monitoring
The monitoring detail expected by stakeholders is generally
proportional to the spatial and temporal scales. That is,
for national and inter-governmental reporting, little
detail is usually expected, because of the sheer volume of
data and the difficulty in comprehending and acting on a
mass of detail. The nature of reports on progress towards
ITTO's Year 2000 Objective is left to member countries. In
contrast, the UNCSD Secretariat closely prescribes the
format and level of detail required for post-UNCED
reporting.
Stakeholders remote from the forest do not usually have the
technical knowledge to make use of detailed monitoring and
therefore look to indices compounded from indicators, or to
simple Yes/No certification decisions.
Stakeholders directly concerned with forest management,
such as national forest services, private forest owners,
forest managers, contractors and concessionaires will need
monitoring as detailed as is required by the nature and
scale of the forest management system which they are
supervising or operating. Some of the debate in Europe is
now centred on what is a reasonable level of monitoring
detail which a private owner or manager can be expected to
provide, relative to the monitoring undertaken by the state
or national forest service, and who should pay for the
monitoring.
Assurance of credibility
At the national and inter-governmental levels, credibility
of monitoring is attained mainly by inter-country
comparisons. Countries which deviate markedly from the
median values for a group of countries with roughly the
same characteristics would be expected to explain the
differences. The same kind of test should be applied to
forest managers at the local forest management unit (LFMU)
level, and this is indeed the procedure used by the main
certification bodies now operating in forestry.
As noted in the previous section on detail in monitoring,
stakeholders remote from the forest management process need
a summary decision about the quality of management in a
source forest. This implies trust in the certification
process, with regard to the nature of the forest
stewardship standards, the reliability of the certification
bodies, and the audit process. Commercial enterprises
dealing in products from certified forests have to acquire
some knowledge of what the certificate means, if only in
relation to the nature of the claims that can be made in
public advertising. Consumer trust is not usually gained
by direct evaluation of certification schemes but by the
endorsement of those schemes by consumer and
environmentalist organizations, relayed and publicised by
broadsheet journalists. The debate on the Internet over
the last several months about the quality of forest
management in teak plantations in Costa Rica shows how
important is professional competence on ! the part of the
managers and certification bodies, trust between all
concerned parties, and care in the public claims which are
made in relation to the certificate of management quality.
A number of national forest services believe that their
monitoring of forest practices is adequate and credible.
They undertake monitoring sufficient in kind and intensity
to satisfy legislation and the political administration.
They argue that this should be sufficient to satisfy all
other stakeholders. Currently, the Forestry Commission of
Great Britain (FCGB) does not allow third-party,
independent certification bodies to have access to
information which would enable them to audit forests owned
and managed by the Forest Enterprise wing of the FCGB.
This stance overlooks the democratic right of consumer
choice but, as there is no Freedom of Information Act in
the U.K., the FCGB stance cannot be challenged legally.
The consumer and environmentalist objection to
"Nanny-knows-best" is that "Nanny's" commissioned
independent study (Lorrain-Smith and Walker 1993) showed
that actual management in privately-owned, grant-aided
woodlands in Great Britain often did not match the
standards prescribed by the FCGB. A declining budget will
make it more difficult in future for the FCGB to insist
that its monitoring is effective and sufficient, even to
its own standards.
More generally, the mandate of national forest services and
their supporting legislation does not cover all the areas
of concern which are encompassed within the current concept
of good forest stewardship. Cultural and social issues are
almost invariably outside the mandate of national forest
services so, just on technical grounds, a government
certification scheme would require unusual coordination
between government agencies.
Disputes in Canada between the Provincial Forest Services,
the commercial forest products companies and
consumer/environmentalist organizations, about the adequacy
of forest monitoring, have led to the involvement of the
Canadian Standards Agency (CSA). Based on work in the
private sector, the CSA has developed an environmental
management systems approach. This approach has fed into
both the Montreal Process for inter-governmental standards
of forest management and an informal international study
group to examine the possibility of a sector-specific
standard under the auspices of the International Standards
Organisation (ISO). Problems with the CSA approach are
discussed in the section below on what to monitor.
In summary, the credibility of government monitoring of the
quality of forest management is low because government is
not viewed as being independent and impartial, and/or
because its managements standards are not sufficiently
enforced. Also, governments tend to take a narrower view
of the concept of forest management than do consumer and
environmentalist organizations. It is generally agreed
that government monitoring is necessary but is not
currently sufficient.
Communicating the results of monitoring
North American efforts at wildlife and wildland
conservation, particularly of species close to extinction,
has shown how important is frequent communication with
stakeholders about positive progress as well as setbacks.
NGOs, especially, need to maintain high levels of interest
and consequent financial support. The NGO experience shows
that a relentlessly optimistic view is not obligatory for
maintaining public credibility and offers too many pitfalls
to entrap the organization when setbacks are encountered.
The multi-facetted nature of modern concepts of forest
management means that it is only too easy to detect faults
in some aspect of management in any forest.
The poor reputation of a number of forest products
companies in private ownership stems partly from their
failures to communicate with stakeholders. Having no
shareholders does not mean having no stakeholders.
Government forest services tend to communicate the results
of monitoring to stakeholders via the written word. In
contrast, public limited companies in the private sector,
and consumer/environmentalist organizations, take a much
more multi-media approach and recognize the power of the
visual image. Easily-obtained films and photographs of
falling trees, burning forests and muddy, rutted extraction
tracks convey strongly negative impressions which are
difficult to counter with images of well-managed forests.
The better-funded conservation organizations and
state/national forest services show that well-chosen
photographs can be effective transmitters of favourable
impressions. However, the value of professionally-shot
video and film is still underrated by smaller forest
services and the private sector. In contrast, some
environmentally-sensitive retailers use videos to train
their staff to answer customers' question about sources of
forest products and quality of forest m! anagement.
What to monitor for the different stakeholders ?
The analysis above showed the great variety of stakeholders
who are associated with the current broad concepts of
forest management, as distinct from a narrow focus on
timber production. The increasing appreciation of the
variety of stakeholders is a re-discovery of what was well
understood and well articulated in the forest policy of
India in the 1890s (IFS 1894). With such a broad
constituency, disagreements about priorities and directions
for forest management are inevitable. The crippling
effects of frequent legal challenges to forest managers
have been one of the factors propelling the US Forest
Service to adopt an ecosystem management approach. A major
feature of this approach is the development of a scenario
of what a particular forest should produce, in goods and
services, in the long term. Agreement on the scenario to
be worked towards requires a long process of conflict
resolution, and an iterative process during which current
understanding of the production c! apacity of the forest is
matched to the various expectation and needs of
stakeholders. The complexity of the social questions to be
addressed is indicated in Emery and Paananen (1995), and a
wide-ranging questionnaire has been issued by the U.S.
National Research Council to capture ideas which could be
used to build scenarios for non-federal forests (Kirk Baer
1996).
The US ecosystem management approach will not eliminate
disagreements about priorities but should provide a more
workable basis for daily forest management, by fostering a
more or less democratic process to agree on what is wanted.
The CSA process likewise calls for early definition of
values and goals, which are equivalent to scenarios in US
ecosystem management. In principle, there should be better
reconciliation of local, regional and national needs for
goods and services and better mechanisms to adjust to
changes in those needs as they change over time - without
such frequent recourse to litigation.
Greater response to local needs and to the diversity of
each forest may imply the monitoring of a greater diversity
in indicators of good forest stewardship/sustainable forest
management). There must be a balance between measuring
everything that could be measured, and the effect of such
measurement on the costs of the goods and services from
that forest when the cost of monitoring is included.
Ideally, the desirability of monitoring will be
self-evident and necessary to the forest manager, and
technically-feasible and economic procedures will be
incorporated conventionally into the local forest
management system. The additional cost of the monitoring
would be negligible, but the cost of certification to
demonstrate good forest stewardship or sustainable forest
management is an unavoidable extra. Experience to date of
third-party certification suggests that the external audit
itself will add only about 1-2 per cent to retail prices.
Clearly, if the forest is being moved from an unmanaged
state to a managed state, there will be significant
management costs. Upgrading the quality of existing
management will be much less shocking. Contrast the
surprise in the Brazilian Amazon about the cost of
introduction of even simple management (Verissimo et al.
1992) with the biophysical and financial benefits of
reduced-impact logging in Sabah (Pinard et al. 1995, Pinard
and Putz in press).
Inter-governmental reporting, for example, for the FAO
Global Forest Assessment and to UNCSD and ITTO, mainly
involves area statistics and estimates of percentage change
from baseline dates. As noted earlier in this paper,
changes in forest quality have not been included in the
past. The methods for monitoring and the levels of
precision are rarely prescribed; in contrast with the
detailed prescriptions for monitoring of CFC gas emissions
under the Montreal Protocol. Counts and areas are included
in the FRA proposals by IIED and WCMC (1994), as well as in
the Helsinki and Montreal Process reporting protocols. It
is left to national agencies to interpret "significant
deviation from the historic range of variation" and similar
wording which occurs frequently in the Montreal Process
(CFS 1995).
If methods of assessment, definitions of classifications,
and levels of accuracy and precision are not prescribed,
great problems of comparability and interpretation are
inevitable, as FAO has noted at each decennial global
forest assessment. The declassification of military
technology, following the end of the Cold War, offers the
near-future prospect of sub-metre resolution from
instruments mounted on earth-orbiting satellites. Greater
uniformity in global assessments, through more centralized
and automated classifications, will reduce the historical
problems caused by the idiosyncrasies of methods used
within individual countries. Moreover, although differences
between countries in assessment systems are regrettable, no
direct economic penalty is incurred as a result.
If criteria and indicators (C/Is) of good forest
stewardship are required only for monitoring of activities
and outcomes at the level of the LFMU, such as an internal
audit of a forest management system, then it would be quite
appropriate to select indicators and associated norms (CSA
"objectives') which are highly situation-specific and which
match the policies and objectives specified in the local
forest management system and management plan; such norms or
target levels of indicators.
However, if the monitoring is to be used to demonstrate
conformity with externally-set standards, then those
standards are usually accompanied by instructions about
methods, accuracy, precision, and the spatial and temporal
aspects of sampling. The indicators to be assessed and the
methods to be used must be standardized, if demonstration
of conformity is a requisite for certification of the
quality of forest management. This standardization is also
necessary if the certification is to be mutually recognized
by certification bodies which are accredited to certify in
relation to a specified set of external standards. This
equivalence is necessary for natural justice and
consumer/environmentalist confidence. Otherwise, a
certificate issued in one place could imply quite different
management standards from those in another. The tight
equivalence of C/Is should be associated with tight
regulation of accreditation of certification bodies.
It is, obviously, a major challenge to devise an assessment
system for quality of forest management which can be
applied impartially, objectively and equitably to all kinds
of forests globally. Indicators to be monitored should be
meaningful and sensitive to change at the local level, and
have the same applicability and meaning in any other
forest. As a first approximation to this ideal, selected
indicators should be those which operate at the highest
level of generalization or abstraction while still being
directly relevant to the local forest management unit. The
administrative desirability of equivalence in C/Is is just
the opposite of the need for adaptation of forest
management systems (FMS) to site-specific circumstances.
The compromise is selection from a menu of indicators for
any one criterion, the indicators being as global as
possible while still being relevant and meaningful at the
LFMU level.
Proponents of environmental management systems (EMS) point
to the huge number of indicators which would have to be
monitored if the needs and expectations of all classes of
stakeholders were to be taken into account. Over 700
criteria and indicators are listed in the full set of
forest stewardship standards of the Initiative Tropenwald
(Hahn-Schilling 1994). These are useful as a checklist
when preparing the management plan for a LFMU but would be
extremely expensive to apply thoroughly in monitoring of
any one forest. The disadvantage of attempting to be
comprehensive is that the diversity of forests and their
human situations will always defeat the attempt; no single
list can encompass all the situations, and even if it
could, problems of comparability and weighting for the
certification decision become overwhelming. Moreover, very
complex systems are difficult for most stakeholders to
comprehend. A common reaction of consultees in the
FSC-U.K. process to the first pu! blic draft of standards
compatible with the global principles and criteria of the
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC ) has been "keep it simple
and cheap, so that our stakeholders are not discouraged".
Consultees have been more concerned about the potential
amount of extra documentation, and the associated cost,
than about possible changes in the forest management
systems themselves and the associated monitoring.
Under the EMS approach, much attention is given to rational
setting of policies and objectives, together with
documented support for those policies and objectives and
the assignment of resources for their attainment. The main
objection from the consumer/environmentalist point of view
to a pure EMS is that the standards to be followed can be
set internally, without comparability to those in use in
adjacent or other forests and without reference to the
needs and expectations of the range of stakeholders. A
common expression of the objection to a pure EMS is "an
excellent EMS would not of itself prevent ecologically
inappropriate harvesting by clear felling". There is no
theoretical impediment to an EMS being mated with
externally-set forest stewardship standards, a point
reiterated frequently by the Executive Director of the FSC.
Emphasis on documentation of policies, objectives,
procedures and monitoring within the ISO formulation of an
EMS makes the development and implementation of an EMS a
major positive factor when monitoring forest practices at
the LFMU level. Given that current concepts of good forest
stewardship/sustainable forest management involve a much
more holistic view of the forest than simply timber
production, and given the natural desire for additional
costs of management and certification to be kept to the
irreducible minimum, the choice of globally meaningful
indicators to be monitored becomes critically important.
This choice is discussed below, with components of the
forest management system.
Monitoring the forest for national/international statistical
reporting
There appear to be no major issues in monitoring at the
national/international levels which do not arise also in
monitoring at the level of the local forest management
unit. The current state of the reporting requirements
under the Helsinki and Montreal protocols represent a
progressive compromise between the wide ranging
implications of the Global Forest Principles and Agenda'21,
and the kinds of national statistics which national forest
services can assemble without major extra expense. At this
stage in both protocols, the individual countries are left
to devise their own methods and standards for compiling the
statistics.
Like proponents of certification at the LFMU level,
participants at the inter-governmental level recognize the
need for progressive and incremental improvements. Reports
of concern about incompatibility between the two levels
seem to reflect the worry of national forest services that
independent certification of the quality of forest
management might erode their mandates and, by extension,
their budgets.
Monitoring for the forest owner and manager
Components of the forest management system
It is a regrettable fact that many countries have had
excellent forest working plans which have been allowed to
become out-of-date and irrelevant. A working plan by
itself is not evidence of good forest stewardship, but most
sets of FSS require plans to be prepared and implemented.
In principle, it would be possible to assess the quality of
forest management over a LFMU which was controlled only by
an unwritten plan, whose details might be held in the
memory of village elders or landowners. However, the cost
of verifying the details and checking for contradictory
interpretations would make it doubtful if such an operation
could ever be certified at bearable financial cost.
Comparison between forest enterprises which currently
practise good forest stewardship with those which are
generally accepted to be deficient suggests that the
presence or absence of a plan is not the major indicator to
be assessed. Rather, the assessor should look for evidence
of high level commitments within the enterprise to policies
and objectives which foster good forest stewardship, and
the dedication of resources to implement those policies.
In other words, an EMS.
The CIFOR test team at Forstamt Bovenden in November 1994
proposed a framework with eight major components, which
correspond to the main elements of operational forest
management systems and concepts of good forest stewardship.
The eight components listed below are slightly modified
from the team's proposal, following discussions in the U.K.
during December 1994 and January 1995. The correspondence
is shown between these components and the Montreal Process
criteria and indicators for use at the
national/inter-governmental level (CFS 1995).
Institutional issues and decision-making processes
a. policy framework
b. regulatory framework (laws, rules, guidelines)
- these two components (a and b) are
summarised in the Montreal Process
criterion 7 "existence of a legal,
institutional and economic framework for
forest conservation and sustainable
management"
c. decision-making processes and associated activities, including:
setting of priorities and targets; mechanisms for
implementation; control of implementation;
audit/monitoring of effects; detection and
correction of mistakes; feedback into development
(update/upgrade) of improved management and
communication systems; documentation and record
keeping.
d. training and research.
Factual basis for evaluation of good forest stewardship
e. productive resource base
- Montreal Process criterion 2 "maintenance
of productive capacity of forest ecosystems" and
- criterion 4 "conservation and maintenance of
soil and water resources"
f. ecosystem processes (cycles and interactions)
- Montreal Process criterion 3 "maintenance
of forest ecosystem health and vitality"
- and criterion 5 "maintenance of forest
contribution to global carbon cycles"
g. biological diversity
- Montreal Process criterion 1 "conservation
of biological diversity"
h. well being of the forest-dependent people
(including social and economic factors)
- Montreal Process criterion 6 "maintenance
and enhancement of long-term multiple
socio-economic benefits to meet the needs
of societies".
Norms for indicators
The successive drafts of Helsinki and Montreal Process
criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management
have progressively focused on the indicators to be assessed
and have avoided prescription about how the implied
objectives should be attained. This contrasts with most of
the FSS developed by NGOs, which tend to mix prescription
and evaluation.
The great difference between the inter-governmental
reporting systems of the Helsinki and Montreal Process
types, and the FSS developed for use at the LFMU level, is
that for the latter there are explicit or implied norms for
the indicators to be assessed in the monitoring process.
A useful distinction is between threshold levels of
indicators and target levels (using terminology now current
in discussion of sustainable development indicators). A
threshold level is the value or level of the indicator,
beyond which the system may change significantly and
damagingly to a state which is effectively irreversible in
a human lifetime. Depending on the nature of the
indicator, the threshold value may represent a cusp or
inflexion on a graph. In contrast, a target value is the
level of the indicator which the implementation of the
forest management system should strive to attain or surpass
during the operational period of the FMS. Some
environmental NGOs would like to see the development of
target values for indicators which would be globally
meaningful and relevant at the LFMU level. It is not clear
how feasible is this aim. The development of target values
for the emission of CFCs under the Montreal Protocol/Vienna
Convention suggests that some indicat! ors of this nature
may be found, for physical and biochemical factors related
to soil and water qualities.
Policy, planning, and social indicators seem, at present,
unlikely to be susceptible to evaluation against
quantitative norms. However, within a given FSS, these
indicators should be assessed with uniform scoring systems,
or at least with scoring systems which are mutually
compatible. The two-fold test should be - do the systems
produce repeatable scores, and are the results
comprehensible to stakeholders.
Characteristics and examples of indicators
A preliminary step is to devise a minimum set of indicators
for monitoring which conform to the following framework:
a. having the attributes of good criteria/indicators
proposed by the Free University of Amsterdam and
the World Bank (see annex 1), and by CSA (document
Z808, draft of January 1996, pages 17-18);
b. having definable attributes such as "orientation"
(relating to an input, a process or activity, or an
outcome of forest management), geographic level
(national, regional, local), and being objectively
assessable or quantifiably measurable;
c. fitting within the 8 components of a forest
management system proposed above, or within the 4
groups of forest functions (regulatory, carrier,
productive and informative);
d. operating at the highest level of
generalization/abstraction while still being
directly relevant to the local forest management unit;
e. relating to an explicitly declared concept of good
forest stewardship, such as the FSC Principles and
Criteria (FSC 1994) and/or ITTO Guidelines (ITTO
1990). This point is important to avoid the
criticism directed at purely ISO type schemes, in
which the operator is permitted to devise internal
Standards without any absolute frame of reference.
Internally-generated Standards would not meet the
expectations of conservation NGOs or consumer groups.
The CIFOR team at the Forstamt Bovenden test provided the
following preliminary examples of indicators which might be
monitored:
* Criteria and indicators for the policy framework
(criterion) National land use policy is implemented at the
level of the local forest management unit.
(indicator) the forest management plan interprets and
specifically refers to the national land
use policy in the spatial assignment of
forestry activities.
* Criteria and indicators for the regulatory framework
(laws, rules, guidelines)
(criterion) Forest management respects all national and
local laws and administrative regulations,
including the national interpretation of
international obligations (such as the
CITES, ILO, ITTA and the Conventions on
Biological Diversity and Climate Change).
(indicator 1) the operations manual (or equivalent
document) requires the staff of the forest
management unit to comply with all legal
requirements.
(indicator 2) the documentation of the forest management
unit confirms compliance with all legal requirements.
(criterion) Legal security of resource rights
(usufruct, tenure) is guaranteed for the
forest owner and operator of the management
unit.
(indicator 1) document of title and/or usufruct licence
has been granted by the appropriate
authority and is legally registered.
(indicator 2) conflicts over resource rights are resolved
by mutual agreement between the parties, or
by arbitration or legal process, and the
decisions are respected and upheld, as
registered in records of the parties in
conflict, arbitrators and/or court records.
(criterion) All legally prescribed charges are paid
promptly and fully.
(indicator) management records confirm that dated
payments have been made and acknowledged.
* Criteria and indicators for the productive resource base
(criterion) Sufficient quantitative data are available
for the whole area of the local management
unit to allow rational planning and
operation of forestry activities.
(indicator 1) statistically valid volume (or weight) and
growth & yield data are current for the
various kinds of forest products generated
in the productive area of the unit,
classified by operational sub-unit (such as
the compartment or stand) and by the age-
and/or size-class distribution. These data
can be displayed in both tabular and map form.
(indicator 2) non-traditional forest products and
services (such as perennial flows of clean
water) are similarly quantified as regards
their standing stock and production
possibilities (flow rates).
(indicator 3) areas within the management unit which are
not in the production working circle (or
equivalent classification) are designated
and displayed on all relevant maps. If
they are subject to protection measures,
critical points on the boundaries of these
areas should also be marked with warning
signs on the ground.
(criterion) Offtake rates of goods and services do not
exceed the sustainable rates of production.
(indicator) offtake rates are continuously monitored
and correctly recorded, and are compared
with statistically valid estimates of
production possibilities.
* Criteria and indicators for ecosystem processes
(cycles and interactions)
(criterion) Hydrological regime is not adversely
affected by forest management operations.
(indicator 1) (riverine strips are large enough so that)
no surface runoff from roads and tracks
passes directly into natural watercourses.
(indicator 2) (riverine strips are large enough so that)
no road construction material passes
directly into natural watercourses.
(indicator 3) no artificial ponding is caused by
construction of roads or tracks or by
inadequate culverts or bridges.
(indicator 4) viable breeding populations of aquatic
organisms are maintained.
(indicator 5) perennial supplies of clean water are maintained.
(indicator 6) quality of outflow water is not less than
the quality of inflow, unless there are
endogenous changes caused by natural
features of the geology or soils within the
LFMU, such as peatswamps
* Criteria and indicators for biodiversity
(criterion) The IUCN Red List category status of
forest-dependent species is not adversely
affected by forest management operations.
(indicator 1) viable healthy breeding populations of
"keystone" species are maintained.
(indicator 2) there is no deliberate reduction in genetic
diversity.
(indicator 3) there is special provision for rare species.
These examples include indicators of process (in relation
to the regulatory framework criteria) and of outcome (in
relation to the forestry practices in the field). As
reiterated above, they are intentionally generalized,
partly to allow mutual recognition of certificates of
quality of forest management. In addition to the
generalized indicators, it is likely that forest
owners/managers will develop indicators to demonstrate
compliance with the enterprise- and forest-specific
prescriptions documented in their forest management
systems. The distinction between the
globally-generalizable and the forest-specific indicators
might help to keep small the number of global indicators
and so reduce costs for small enterprises with simple
management systems.
Because of the difficulty of devising indicators which are
truly global in applicability and simultaneously locally
relevant, forest managers might be offered the option of
proposing alternative indicators for any one criterion,
which would be in keeping with the particular circumstances
of their own forests and compatible with the generalized
indicators. Some consultees in the FSC-U.K. process for
developing national Standards felt that this option was too
liable to abuse in some countries and would give rise to
endless arguments about the comparability of certificates
issued under any one set of FSS. These objectors included
Greenpeace.
The CSA proposal (document Z808, draft of January 1996)
opts for a well structured and rigorous EMS combined with
indicators which must be selected locally through public
consultation. CSA acknowledged that "In very small areas,
selecting indicators becomes [impracticable]". CSA was
also frank that public consultation could involve a long
and/or complex reiterative process of indicator selection
and discard.
Monitoring with remote sensors
It will be evident from a consideration of the components
of a forest management system and the indicators
exemplified above that imagery from remote sensing
instruments on earth-orbiting satellites can provide only a
fraction of the desired information for certification.
AVHRR imagery provides 1 km resolution, older Landsat 80
metres, while the newer Landsat and SPOT both provide 30
metres. Remote sensing and GPS literature is looking
forward to the declassification of military technology as
part of the "Peace Dividend" at the ending of the Cold War,
or the development of civilian technology, to allow
resolution to improve to 1 metre or less. Leaving aside
the stupendous problems of storing such data streams, and
of selectively retrieving the desired information over
periods as long as tree rotation lengths, remote sensing
can provide useful information about spatial changes in
atmospheric temperature profiles and the reflectance
characteristics of ground cover.
A geometrically rectified print of a single Landsat scene
costs between US$ 1100 and 1600 from the Brazilian national
space agency INPE. Although some NGOs in developing
countries are equipped to use computer-compatible tapes of
remotely sensed imagery, most national and state forest
services, forest enterprises and environmentalist
organizations in developing countries lack the training to
make full use of such imagery. The cost of hardware and
materials is rarely an obstacle for an organization which
can make use of the information. Moreover, through the
Internet, an increasing volume of imagery is becoming
available for little more than the cost of telecom time to
download the data or images. Experience in Latin America
suggests that the main barrier to efficient use of remotely
sensed imagery is inadequate training and consequent lack
of confidence.
The much publicised attractions of remotely sensed imagery,
and its relatively low cost, have tended to diminish the
use of aerial photographs at scales of 1:2000 to 1:60,000.
There has been surprisingly little use for monitoring in
the tropics of video imagery from cameras mounted in booms
attached to light aircraft or, on a more restricted scale,
of videos from ultralight aircraft. For special situations
which need inspection of areas which are difficult or
dangerous to reach on the ground, a video camera mounted in
a miniature helicopter costs upwards of US$ 3,000 per day.
The Hover-Cam is restricted to a range of about 400 metres
in line of sight from the pilot controlling the robot
helicopter from the ground. This would be too expensive to
use in audits of most forest enterprises, but is an
indication that absence of technology is not a major
problem in assessment of those factors which can be
evaluated through remotely sensed imagery.
Snapshots versus trends
Snapshot information (indicator data assessed at a
particular date or time) is of limited use by itself.
Sustainable forest management can be evaluated only in
retrospect. One can say that a particular forest has been
managed so that the productive capacity has been
maintained, enhanced or degraded in relation to a
previously assessed baseline, or in relation to a trend
determined through repeated assessments of the same
indicators using the same methodology. Snapshot
information related to the same indicators from similar
forests might suggest the relative quality of forest
management in a particular forest, but would be much less
useful than comparison with trend data from the same
forest.
Forest stewardship is a more workable and equitable concept
than sustainable forest management. Stewardship is
assessed by reference to the commitment to sustainable
management (as expressed in an enterprise's policy
statements), to the specific objectives and mechanisms (as
expressed in the documented forest management system), and
to the matching of indicator values to target values
registered in the FMS documents.
It should not be possible to certify the sustainability of
forest management until an enterprise has established a
track record and has accumulated, or inherited, baseline
and/or trend data for indicators. However, this is
patently unfair if an enterprise's tenure over a forest is
too short for it to obtain such information. Given that
management tenure, especially through the concession
system, is often limited to years rather than decades,
certification of the quality of forest stewardship is more
equitable. The same indicators or kinds of indicators
should be assessed for both concepts.
With very few exceptions, long-term trend data in the
tropics is confined to tree growth and survival in yield
plots and silvicultural experiments. Although some
long-term plots date to the 1930s, the principal series
were started in the late 1950s. Some of these plots have
been lost because of inadequate initial mapping (Sarawak),
government policy decisions in favour of a change in land
use (Peninsular Malaysia), damage during re-entry before
the end of the regeneration cycle (many countries), civil
war and other disorders (Philippines and Uganda). Data
from some plot series have been difficult to interpret,
because of official or unofficial changes in assessment
practices, sometimes documented (Ghana and Uganda).
Registers of long-term plot series have been compiled by
the ASEAN Institute of Forest Management, by FORTECH at the
Australian National University, and by the S4.02 subject
group of IUFRO.
Most other long-term records in the tropics are restricted
in duration to the working lifetime of the enthusiast who
started the series. This applies especially to
ornithological censuses, which may be the best available
long-term sets for assessment of changes in biodiversity.
BirdLife International is compiling a register of such
sets. Detailed bird records may also be good indicators of
changes in quality of forest habitat, and similar claims
are made for dung beetles (Nigel Stork at the Cooperative
Research Centre - Tropical Rainforest Ecology and
Management, James Cook University, Australia), moths
(Jeremy Holloway at the Natural History Museum, U.K.) and
nematodes (Nigel Price at the CAB International Institute
of Parasitology, U.K.).
It is not clear that simultaneous modelling of the
behaviour of multiple aspects of forest management will be
helpful, in relation to a certification decision, until
there is greater clarity about the indicators which satisfy
a consensus of stakeholders. Model results, projected from
past trends, may indicate that the current management
regime is sustainable. Moir and Mowrer (1995) stress that
models cannot (yet) measure or incorporate the
probabilities of increasing stochasticity, critical
threshold or extreme-value events, or chaotic system
behaviour. They advocate a conservative approach to
management, maintaining/enhancing biodiversity, and
avoiding operations which might create overcompensating
feedbacks.
Costs of monitoring
It seems to be difficult to disaggregate the overall costs
of monitoring which national forest services undertake. In
the consultations for the development of FSC-compatible
Standards for the U.K., the FCGB has expressed concern
about the additional costs of improved management
(including self-monitoring) and of external audit. At
present, the probable costs of external audit by
third-party certification bodies are commercially
confidential. Various statements by one FSC-accredited
certification body suggest that audit costs might increase
retail prices by about 1-2 per cent, including audit of the
chain of custody from forest gate to retailer. The FCGB is
apparently not able to separate from its accounts the costs
of the monitoring of grant-aided private sector forestry by
its woodland officers. NGOs such as the Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds have expressed concern that the
FCGB's guidelines for and monitoring of both state and
private forestry may be inadeq! uate in relation to the
U.K.'s international obligations (Cosgrove and Turner
1995).
Priority setting or weighting among criteria and indicators
Problem of non-equivalence
If monitoring is undertaken to improve the quality of
forest management, as a tool within an enterprise or a
national forest service, it would be rational to vary the
importance of different indicators in accordance with the
circumstances and objectives of different forests. When
monitoring is used as a tool to aid inter-governmental
reporting or mutually recognized certification, then
standardization becomes essential. When certification is
the issue, and the decision is a simple Yes/No - the forest
is under good stewardship, conducive towards sustainable
forest management, or it is not - then the ranking of
criteria and indicators and/or the weighting of the
indicator values becomes extremely important.
The difficulty is obvious. If the monitoring system is
sensitive to the circumstances of a particular forest, the
ranking and weighting may be quite inappropriate for any
other forest. If tenure over forest resources is a major
issue in one forest but is not critical in an adjacent
forest, how should the respective rankings be managed so as
to arrive at a certification decision which is comparable
with and comprehensible to stakeholders everywhere else ?
Are social factors more important than pollution records ?
Does maintenance of bio-geo-physico-chemical water quality
and perennial flows of clean water rank higher than
enhanced biodiversity ?
Certification bodies currently accredited by FSC have taken
different approaches to this difficult issue. The Smart
Wood programme of the Rainforest Alliance (RALL 1993)
emphasises consensual agreement between stakeholders and
the audit team at the start of the inspection. The
criteria are refined and weighted to account for a variety
of factors such as scale and intensity of the forest
management and the scatter of the forests within the
applicant enterprise. Indicators are scored on a
subjectively-applied scale from 0 = not applicable, through
1 = strongly unfavourable, to 5 = strongly favourable.
Smart Wood has acknowledged that the system is
unsatisfactory because of its non-equivalence between
forests or enterprises and will refine its procedures as
part of the conditionality attached to the first year of
accreditation by the Forest Stewardship Council.
The Forest Conservation Program of Scientific Certification
Services (SCS 1994) collects indicator data and interviews
stakeholders as input to the judgement of the relative
importance of each criterion with three major elements
(timber resource sustainability, forest ecosystem
maintenance, and financial and socio-economic
considerations). The relative importance of each criterion
is determined through a formal, numerical, multiple
attribute ranking algorithm. The certification decision is
presented as percentage scores in each of the three major
elements. There is obviously still a major role for
subjective judgement and for possible bias in the sampling
of the stakeholder opinions.
Hazard analysis by critical control points
It may help to reduce the areas for disagreement about the
equivalence of certificates if the number of indicators
could be reduced and ranking or weighting eliminated.
Developers of FSS have taken a variety of approaches to
listing of criteria and indicators. RALL Smart Wood have
only a short list, generalized in a manner which should
facilitate compatibility with an EMS. ITW chose the other
extreme, with a highly detailed checklist. All the CIFOR
test teams have noted that the FSS being compared are not
strictly comparable, because they have been developed from
different philosophical standpoints and constituencies.
Not surprisingly, however, there are many elements in
common to all the FSS, including those used in
inter-governmental reporting formats.
One way to reduce the number of indicators to be monitored
could be a HACCP - Hazard Analysis by Critical Control
Points (Maurice 1994, Gibson 1995). This system for
focusing on critical aspects of a system was devised
initially to ensure the maximum safety of food for US
astronauts - gastric disorder in a cramped spacecraft could
be most unpleasant. The HACCP was a review of the entire
system, from growing the food through harvesting and
transport, processing, packaging, and storage. The review
identified those points in the system at which pollution
was most likely to occur, and then concentrated control
measures at those points. NASA felt that it was impossible
to attempt to monitor all aspects of the food chain, even
when financial resources were almost unlimited.
The parallel with the forest management system is that both
that and the astronauts' food chain have many interacting
elements from a huge and varying list of inputs and
processes (both physical activities and managerial
decisions). The difference is that NASA had a quite
restricted range of outcomes (different types of food),
while the range of stakeholders means that the forest
owner/ manager has a much larger variety of outcomes.
There may be useful parallels also for foresters in the
selection and condensation of sustainable development
indicators into politically usable indices (Hammond et al.
1995). However, at the level of the LFMU, the forest
owner/manager may have problems in interpretation of the
causes of changes in highly aggregated indicators, unless
those changes are quantifiably related to specific causes.
Analysis of criteria and/or indicators in relation to
the certification decision
After reducing to a minimum the subjectivity of indicator
assessments and the number of indicators, there remains the
problem of assimilating personnel recruitment scores, fish
population numbers and extraction track areas (or other
indicator values) to a single certification decision. The
SCS procedure has been mentioned above. The "analytic
hierarchy process" described by Kangas (1992) uses a
pair-wise analysis similar to that of SCS but also relies
on the consistency and narrow span of stakeholder opinions.
The multicriteria analyses approach favoured by some
specialists in sustainability indicators (for example,
Munasinghe and McNeely 1995) follows a comparable
philosophy which seems to produce consensual answers when
the main factors can be reduced to a common currency which
is, usually, money. It seems likely that more consensus is
required on methods for holistic valuation of forests
before a multicriteria analysis in support of certification
decisions would be ge! nerally acceptable.
Research needs for improved monitoring
Less than a decade has passed since certification of the
quality of forest management emerged as an important issue
for consumer and environmentalist organizations. The UNCED
process and the publication of the report "Our Common
Future" by the World Commission on Environment and
Development (the Brundtland Commission - WCED 1987)
coincided with widespread dissatisfaction with government
and industry monitoring of the state of forests. IIED's
report to ITTO in 1988, on the tiny proportion of forest in
ITTO producer countries under a recognizable form of
sustainable management (Poore et al. 1989) stimulated
demand for market incentives for better management.
There are currently over 25 sets of FSS under development,
mostly for application within a particular country but some
devised with the intention of generic applicability.
Government agencies and NGOs developing FSS have made most
progress when taking an incremental approach, involving
broad consultations with a wide range of stakeholders. It
is a reasonable concern of national forest services, forest
managers and the forest products industries that
certification should not add significantly to the price of
forest products, either through improvements to field
forest management or in the audit process.
It is mainly the responsibility of the developers of FSS to
justify the criteria and indicators which they propose, and
to show how these relate to critically important aspects of
a holistic view of managed forests. Nearly all the current
sets of FSS have indicators which are so numerous or so
costly to measure that their wholesale incorporation into
forest management systems could disadvantage those
operators which are seeking to respond transparently to
public concerns. Most of the current developers of FSS are
committed publicly to progressive refinement of their
Standards as knowledge and experience accumulate.
The two aspects of indicators which need most research are:
a. rationalized choice of a minimum set of indicators;
b. methods for assimilating the values of the chosen
indicators into a Yes/No certification decision.
The minimum set should be large enough to cover all the
major components of a forest management system, and should
be selected to be as globally applicable as possible yet
still meaningful and relevant at the LFMU level. The aim
should be to replace the current reliance on best
professional judgement with impartial, objective and
transparent assessments. Because of the large numbers of
forest stakeholders, and the breadth of their concerns, it
is difficult to set priorities for composing and refining
the set of indicators relevant to certification. Given
that certification is a market-driven process, which relies
on consumer demand, an early concentration on satisfying
the concerns of the general public (as summarised earlier
in this paper) could provide direction. Such an approach
would also be conducive towards establishing public
credibility for the certification process, a major theme of
the organizers of this conference.
At this early stage in certification, it may be found that
the criteria and indicators preferred by consumer and
environmental groups are not cost-efficient or
cost-effective, or are too difficult to evaluate with
scientifically acceptable methods, or lack adequate
technology. Such findings would be helpful in developing
market understanding of the complexity of forest management
and the extraordinary difficulty of making definitive
judgements.
It should be self-evident that the results of monitoring
ought to feed back into the process of dynamic forest
management. However, as shown by the accumulations of
unanalysed data from long-term sample plots in many
countries, the feedback does not happen automatically. One
of the strengths of an EMS is the requirement for
demonstration of feedback loops in management. Many
developing countries lack the skills for managing
monitoring data, and require substantial training.
However, there should also be improvement in the techniques
for communicating and using the results of monitoring,
including dissemination to interested but non-technical
stakeholders.
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Annex 1 - Some characteristics and selection criteria for indicators
The CIFOR field team at the first comparative test of
selected FSS at Forstamt Bovenden in 1994 reviewed papers
by the World Bank, World Resources Institute and Free
University of Amsterdam on indicators or environmental
quality and sustainable development. The following table
summarised the review:
Desirable characteristics of indicators
1. represent components or processes of real world
systems / explicit or implicit models / represent
reversible and manageable processes.
2. are empirical specification of concepts which
cannot be fully operationalized on the basis of
generally accepted rules / a compromise between
scientific accuracy and the demand for concise
information but still having a scientific basis.
If the phenomenon is not easily expressed in
scientific terms (as in some social phenomena), the
indicators should at least be well defined and
clearly expressed.
3. quantify information, more than words or pictures
alone, through a fixed (prescribed, rather than
unchanging) methodology of measurement / include
reference or threshold values / numerical values
have significance beyond the numerical value itself
(surrogate for complex variables).
4. have predictive meaning, providing direct
information about a possible or likely future of
the system represented by the indicator.
5. simplify information about complex phenomena, so as
to improve communication.
6. provide information without social bias (not
subject to different interpretations according to
social group).
Criteria for selection of indicators
a. sensitivity to changes in time.
b. sensitivity to changes across space.
c. sensitivity to change over social distribution.
d. sensitivity to reversibility of effects.
e. sensitivity to controllability of effects.
f. predictive ability.
g. integrative ability.
h. ease of data collection.
i. relative ease of application.
j. relevance to vulnerability of ecosystems and
assessment of risk / detection of cusps in
environmental response surfaces.
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Annex 2 - tracing of supplies from the global market by Timbmet Ltd.
As Europe's largest hardwood importer, Timbmet (Oxford,
U.K.) has had much call to consider its position with
regard to environmental issues. Timbmet is increasingly
being asked by customers and environmental groups for
verification that its timber comes from well managed and
'sustainable' sources. As a result, the post of
Environmental Coordinator was created at Timbmet with the
brief of identifying all timber stocked to its source at
forest level. Information will be collated from all of
Timbmet's suppliers. They will then be allocated a rating,
based on the details and documented evidence that they can
provide in relation to their environmental standards. This
information will be used by Timbmet's purchasing director
to purchase preferentially from those suppliers which
demonstrate the highest environmental credentials, with the
aim of eliminating all suppliers which cannot demonstrate
good forest management. At present Timbmet stocks about 60
species from hundred! s of suppliers and forest worldwide.
The task of verifying the sources all of these timbers and
gaining meaningful information on all suppliers is long and
complex.
A number of routes are being used to obtain
information on the source of Timbmet's timber. By
approaching various different sources, it is hoped that
general information will be accumulated on the producing
countries as well as specific details of Timbmet's direct
suppliers.
Information is being requested from Timbmet's
suppliers through the medium of questionnaires. These are
being sent out in order to obtain information concerning
the sources of Timbmet's timber, and also the route that
the timber has taken prior to reaching the company's yard.
By the time the timber reaches Timbmet's gate, it has
already passed through a number of links in the wood chain.
The questionnaires are designed so that each of the linking
enterprises, through which the timber has passed, should
answer a section of the questionnaire before passing the
questionnaire onto that link's own suppliers. Questions
addressed to Timbmet's agents, shippers and the primary
mills request information on how they may be contacted.
Other questions are designed to assess the supplier's
commitment to environmental improvement and, in particular,
the good management of the world's forests. Suppliers are
asked, for example, whether they have an environmental
policy, or a policy to! purchase timber only from well
managed forests.
In order to obtain information on the forest source
of Timbmet's timber, the questionnaires are to be sent to
the forest owners or concession holders. As well as
questions concerning contacts and evidence of their
commitment to environmental issues, the respondents are
asked more detailed questions concerning the management of
their forests. Timbmet is asking if a management plan is
being implemented, what type of forest is being managed, if
there is a reforestation programme, as well as questions
designed to assess whether sustained yield forestry is
being implemented. Timbmet asks questions designed to
elicit whether the forest is being managed in such a way
which would make it eligible for application for
certification by a FSC-accredited certification body.
The questionnaires are tailored to each of the
countries to which they are sent. For example, the forest
managers will be asked if they are members of any trade
association in their country. As Timbmet gains information
on the trade association, this one simple question to the
supplier will yield a large amount of information regarding
the commitments and requirements. It is hoped that such an
approach to the design of the questionnaires will help the
applicant relate the questionnaire to their own situation.
Only a few responses have been received so far to
the questionnaires. It obviously takes time for the
questionnaires to filter back down the wood supply chain
and for all of the parties concerned to complete their
respective sections. Most of the information we have
managed to collate so far has come from North American
suppliers. The amount of detail they have been able to
provide to Timbmet has varied. Some suppliers have been
very encouraging, including details of their forest
management. Others are however vague, with broad
geographical regions being given for forest location, and
only limited information on forest owners. Only time will
tell if the gaps in the information can be filled in as
Timbmet returns to ask for more of the information. A
number of Timbmet's agents have expressed doubts about the
likelihood of determining the exact forest from where all
of Timbmet's timber originated. This has been the main
reason for trying to assess all of the stages in! the wood
supply chain through which Timbmet's timber has passed.
Even if Timbmet only manages to obtain information from the
first stages back along the wood supply chain, the company
will at least have some indication of the level of
commitment exhibited as a starting point. Timbmet will
know if timber from well managed forests is being sourced,
and will be able to identify weak links in the chain.
Many of the gaps in the information may not be due
to the impossibility of provision by the suppliers, but to
the perceived impracticality of the process. Imagine the
wood supply chain as a fan with Timbmet at the epicentre of
the fan. Timbmet has over 200 direct suppliers in the form
of agents or shippers. They in turn may deal up to one
hundred suppliers with mills. Each of these mills may use
timber from up to a hundred forests. In the worst case
scenario, Timbmet is therefore asking for information on
two million forest areas worldwide. Moreover, this figure
is not static, because mills process timber from different
forests at different times. At the mill level, timber from
a large number of forests is combined and sawn to meet
Timbmet's specifications. It is therefore a very complex
process to find out from which forest the timber was
derived unless, as is sometimes the case, the mills own
their own forest, or only use timber from a limited number
of forest owne! rs. That said, money has changed hands and
so it should be possible to trace back to the timbers
source through the succession of related invoices.
Clearly, it would be simpler to follow timber from the
forest through the wood supply chain, rather than working
back down the chain from Timbmet's mill. This would be the
approach taken by FSC-accredited certification bodies,
through their chain of custody verification. In that
process, each of the processors and handlers of the timber
must be certified as suppliers of certified timber.
Obligations include physical separation of timber from
certified sources, from non-certified timber.
A further complication in tracing timber sources is
that, in areas which are cut over once and then are to be
left to regenerate for a number of decades, the information
Timbmet receives will only be valid for limited periods,
becoming rapidly outdated. This is another reason for
assessing the level of commitment throughout the chain. If
Timbmet knows that a shipper, for example, is committed to
sourcing timber from well managed forests, the company may
rely on that shipper to act responsibly even if Timbmet
does not have detailed information from each of those
forests at all times.
As a customer of the suppliers, Timbmet can put
pressure on them to meet high environmental standards by
giving preference to those who can demonstrate commitment
and provide evidence that they are promoting and practising
good forest management. By giving preferential treatment
to those who can demonstrate good forest management,
Timbmet provides a market incentive for the suppliers to
maintain or improve their environmental standards.
By putting this pressure on the suppliers however,
there is the danger that they will provide just the
information which they think that Timbmet wants to hear.
Verifying that the received information is correct and
complete is the next step in the collation of environmental
information.
Cross referencing of information is one way in
which the authenticity of the received information will be
assessed. Documentation from national forestry services of
producer countries provides information on their national
forest policy. Similarly, information collated from trade
associations details members' commitments and requirements.
The combined information should indicate how the forests
should be managed. Timbmet can use this combined
information to assess compliance and non-compliance with
regulations by comparison with the answers received from
suppliers. Cross-referencing ('triangulation') can also be
carried out by collecting data from various suppliers, who
in turn source timber, and therefore data, from the same
set of upstream suppliers. Some of the claims made by
Timbmet's suppliers can be verified by directors of the
company, and by Timbmet's agents, when they visit Timbmet's
suppliers. Until there is a mechanism for independently
tracing timber from! the forest to the end user, Timbmet
will have to rely on the information that Timbmet's various
sources of information can provide, cross-referencing as
much as possible in order to substantiate claims.
Through this process, Timbmet expects to obtain
vast amounts of information and to be able to assess, to
some extent, its reliability. Based on the amount of
information deemed reliable, and the level of commitment
demonstrated, Timbmet's suppliers will be graded.
Purchasing will be directed towards those with the highest
environmental standards. It is recognized that while
studying written information received in Oxford, from
forests all around the world, Timbmet staff are not
qualified or able to determine if a forest is being
sustainably managed. Timbmet aims to identify indicators
of good forest management and to promote its application.
Assessment of sustainable forest management needs to be
carried out in the forests by people qualified to do so.
As more timber becomes available from certified forests,
Timbmet will preferentially purchase it, so promoting
sustainable management of the world's forests. Until then,
the next best option is to verify the sources of the
timber, thus promoting trade in timber from well managed
forests, reducing trade in timber from inappropriately
managed sources, and putting into place the systems and
framework for allowing the marketing of certified,
sustainably produced timber.
Clearly there are pitfalls with the process of
tracing timber. There are however very many positive
points. Through this process, Timbmet is gaining large
amounts of information from its suppliers about their
awareness of environmental issues and commitment to
improvement, as well as about the source and route that the
timber has taken prior to reaching the company's yard.
Checking on the sources of the timber is an interim
measure, prior to greater availability of forest
certification and chain of custody verification. Although
it is not faultless, verification of sources is an
essential process leading to the marketing of certified,
sustainably produced timber and will lead to the increase
in trade of timber from those suppliers who make noteworthy
progress in good forest management.
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John Palmer has been associated with the development of the
principles and criteria of the Forest Stewardship Council
since 1990 and has been a member of the advisory board for
the Responsible Forestry Programme of the Soil Association
(U.K.) since 1992. Tropical Forestry Services Ltd. helped
with the editing and English version of the forest
stewardship standards (FSS) developed by Initiative
Tropenwald in Germany, 1994. John Palmer was team leader
for the first of the multi-locational tests of FSS
coordinated by the Center for International Forestry
Research (CIFOR), at Forstamt Bovenden in Germany in
November 1994. He is consultant co-author of the
evaluation and accreditation manual of the Forest
Stewardship Council, and vice-chairman of the Standards
working group within the FSC-U.K.consultative committee.
Monitoring forest practices - Palmer, Curtin & Graham
-------------------------------
Tropical Forestry Services Ltd.
John Palmer and Mary Marshall
3 Beechcroft Road, Summertown
Oxford OX2 7AY, U.K.
tel: +44 (0 1865) 554 004
fax: +44 (0 1865) 311 505
E-mail tropical.forestry@rmplc.co.uk
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