IT IS still a jungle out there – but only just. Twenty years of international pledges and environmental campaigning have barely improved the state of the world’s tropical forests, according to the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of how forests are being managed.
The embarrassing admission comes from the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Japan-based agency set up in 1986 by the producers and consumers of tropical timber to promote “sustainable” forestry. Its members include governments in charge of four-fifths of the world’s tropical forests. After 20 years of activity, however, the ITTO concedes that only 3 per cent of tropical forests meet its own standards of good management.
“After 20 years of conservation activity, only 3 per cent of tropical forests meet standards of good management”
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“The security of most tropical forests is still in great jeopardy,” said ITTO executive director Manoel Sobral Filho, launching the report in Mexico last week.
There are 1200 million hectares of forests across the tropics. Of these, roughly two-thirds are designated by their governments as “permanent forest”, set aside either for outright conservation or for sustainable production of timber. The ITTO study, headed by veteran British forestry consultant Duncan Poore, aimed to find out whether members’ promises of permanence for their forests stood up to scrutiny.
Only 36 million hectares of forests passed muster. The remainder were either badly managed or not managed at all.
The only good news is that the results are better than during the last such review, also carried out by Poore, in 1988. Then, less than 1 per cent of tropical forests were sustainably managed. However, the improvement is hardly what campaigners would have hoped for.
“Our findings provide some basis for hope, but there is a long way to go,” Poore told 91av. He points to improved forest management in Malaysia and Gabon, for instance, but admits that enforcement of forest management laws has broken down in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea.
“The basic problem is that there are fewer financial returns for looking after tropical forests than for converting them to other uses like farming,” Poore says. Illegal logging remains rife across the tropics, he found, often with official connivance. He calls for more investment in forest policing and training of forest managers.
“Forest dwellers are the only people to have demonstrated that they can manage rainforests sustainably”
Simon Counsell of UK-based environment group the Rainforest Foundation says the tactics that Poore advocates aren’t working. “The international community should stop pouring hundreds of millions of aid dollars into trying to make the tropical logging industry more sustainable,” he says. “Instead it should support indigenous groups and other forest dwellers themselves. They are the only people to have demonstrated that they can manage rainforests sustainably.”
