Tropical forests are protected only on paper

Less than five percent of the world's tropical forests surveyed in a new report are being managed in a sustainable way, although this still represents a huge improvement over the situation a decade ago. In other words, "A total area of tropical forest about the size of Germany is in good hands," according to Manoel Sobral Filho, executive director of the Japan-based International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), whose 59 member countries represent 80 percent of the world's tropical forests and more than 90 percent of the global tropical timber trade. The ITTO report "Status of Tropical Forest Management 2005," released on May 25, was four years in the making and covers 2,011 acres of tropical forest in 33 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. The good news is that between 1988 and 2005, the total area under sustainable management–defined as maintaining a forest without degrading its value, while allowing society to benefit from its resources–has grown from less than 2.5 million acres to at least 89 million acres. Still, some 29 million acres of tropical forests are converted every year to agriculture, pasture land and other non-forest uses, and many more are degraded by unsustainable or illegal logging and other poor land-use practices. "The main reason forests are destroyed is for the land underneath," said Alistair Sarre, one of the report's editors, in an interview from Sydney, Australia. "With logging, even when it is unchecked, the forest will eventually re-grow." The report found that ITTO members have developed plans on paper for managing 27 percent of the 872 million acres designated as production forests. In reality, however, only about 62 million acres, or seven percent of those forests, are being managed sustainably. This gap was evident in all regions, it says. In Asia and the Pacific, ITTO estimates that only 35 million acres of production forest are being sustainably managed, even though some 1.1 billion acres are supposed to be covered by management plans. In Africa, 24 million acres are under management plans but just 10.6 million are actually sustainably managed, while in Latin America and the Caribbean, the gap is 76 million versus 16 million acres. Even in those forests considered to be officially "protected," totaling 1,139 million acres, effective management plans only exist for about 3.9 percent. And those plans have actually been implemented in just 2.4 percent of the forests. The consequences of forest destruction range from increased danger of landslides to extinction of species and lost livelihoods for local people. "There is a whole range of effects, from the local to the global," Sarre said. "As you lose forests, you inevitably lose biodiversity. Many of the world's most important medicines were derived from natural products, and there are probably many more potential products that we don't know about and may never know about if these species are lost." "In addition, forests store a large amount of carbon, so you lose their sequestering power and the carbon already stored there is released into the atmosphere, which is thought to contribute to global warming," he said. "More locally, it can have a huge impact on forest-dependent communities, who get their subsistence needs from the forest." The report found that most of the forests under active protection are in the Asia/Pacific (12.6 million acres) and Latin America/Caribbean regions (10.6 million acres). In Africa, only 4.2 million acres of tropical forest have viable protection plans. Countries that have made the greatest progress in sustainable management include Malaysia, which now has at least 11.8 million acres of sustainably managed production forests, Bolivia (5.4 million acres), Peru (1.38 million acres), Brazil (3.5 million acres), the Republic of Congo (3.2 million acres), Gabon (3.7 million acres) and Ghana (667,200 acres.) Those with the most extensive deforestation include Ivory Coast, the Philippines and Nigeria, while armed conflicts have also stymied progress in Liberia, Cambodia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The report calls for a global approach to funding the costs of sustainable management, and for governments to set aside categories of land, whether public or private, that would be kept under permanent forest cover. "Political will is definitely lacking some places, but political will would be stronger if we could make a case for the economics," Sarre said. "It's pretty hard for a government to turn down a developer that's going to pay lots of taxes and employ lots of people by putting in an industrial project in a poor country–or in any country, for that matter." "What we need is good prices for timber, and more payments for the other services that forests provide, like carbon, biodiversity and water. Ideally, in our economically rational world, the user would pay, but who is the end user of biodiversity?" "In effect that means the global community, but developing a mechanism is problematic," he added. "People have been talking about it and working on this question for a while but nothing viable has emerged." Sarre said several different approaches have proven effective, including using overseas development aid and the expertise of international non-governmental organizations to help build capacity to enforce existing laws and train local people in sustainable forest management. "Fundamentally, however, the economics of sustainable forest management need to change," he concluded. "For example, more of the value of the timber needs to be captured in the country. Right now, much of it is shipped out in raw form, even as logs, and very little of the value is kept and thus makes little contribution to development." "In Malaysia, perhaps the most advanced country in terms of sustainable forest management, they have a very good processing sector and we believe there is a link. In the longer term, as countries develop economically, they can put more resources into sustainable forest management, and one of the tasks of the international community is to assist them while they are growing their economies, to keep it as sustainable as possible." The report will be released at the 40th Session of the International Tropical Timber Council, which is meeting May 29-June 2 in Mérida, Mexico.