FRAMEWORK FOR
ASEAN REGIONAL CRITERIA AND INDICATORS FOR SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OF
NATURAL TROPICAL FORESTS
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Including the Assessment Procedures for
ASEAN Regional Criteria and Indicators for
Sustainable Management of Natural Tropical Forests
F o r e s t r y P u b l i c a t i o n S e r i e s No.1
FRAMEWORK FOR
ASEAN REGIONAL CRITERIA AND INDICATORS FOR SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OF
NATURAL TROPICAL FORESTS
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Worldwide, the demands of the human community on the forests have increased but the extent of forests keep on declining. Forests are essential to the long-term well being of local populations, national economies, and the earth’s biosphere as a whole. In adopting the statement of Forest Principles and Chapter 11 of Agenda 21, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) recognized the importance of sustainability managing all types of forests in order to meet the needs of present and future generations. Therefore, a particular demand exists in science and practice to formulate and test improved management concepts and systems.
Efficient utilization and adapted silviculture technology must be implemented to manage and protect the world’s forests as a global and local heritage and economic resource. NGOs developed the concept of certification of management and trade marking of timber to promote sustainability. Professional foresters, timber traders and industrialists worldwide understood that certification is not an issue of politics, but of efficient and sustained timber production and successful marketing.
Since then forest product certification is growing and gathering momentum. The issue has captured the attention of governments, industry, environmentalists, and consumers around the world, and certification efforts and related events are proliferating at a slow pace both at home and abroad. Most attention to the topic has focused on determining standards, systems, and methods of certification.
The development of criteria and indicators for the conservation and sustainable management of tropical forest is an important step in implementing the UNCED Forest Principles and Agenda 21, and is relevant to the UN conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification. It is also an important step to furthering the joint commitment made by tropical timber consumer countries in January 1994 to maintain, or achieve by the year 2000, the sustainable management of tropical forests.
The criteria and indicators are intended to provide a common understanding of what is meant by sustainable forest management. They also provide a common framework for describing, assessing and evaluating a country’s progress toward sustainability at the national level.
The approach to forest management reflected in the criteria and indicators is the management of forests as ecosystems. Taken together, the set of criteria and indicators suggests an implicit definition of the conservation and sustainable management of forest ecosystems at the country level. It is recognized that no single criterion or indicator is alone an indication of sustainability. Rather, individual criteria and indicators should be considered in the context of other criteria and indicators.
Toward this effect, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was established in 1993 with the mandate to set a code of practice for certification, to accredit the certifiers, and to promote the development of national standards of forest management for the purpose of certification in which should be compatible with FSC, ITTO, ISO and other recognized standards. The FSC principles used for certification are designed to ensure all types of forests are managed in ways that are environmentally appropriate: socially, beneficial; and economically viable. Certifiers will use site-specific forest management standards for the evaluation of individual forests. These national and/or regional standards are to be developed locally through a multi-stakeholder consultive process. Until now FSC is getting world-wide acceptance whereby up-to-date more than 20.0 million hectares are being certified by FSC alone. In this context, “the FSC is not insisting on perfection in satisfying the principles and criteria, but major failures in individual principles will normally disqualify a candidate from certification”.
In Malaysia, a very important step towards the establishment of a timber certification scheme was taken on 4 July 1997, when the 13th Meeting of the National Forestry Council (NFC), chaired by the Honorable Deputy Prime Minister, approved the formation of the National Timber Certification Council (NTCC) as the non-profit organization responsible for the planning and operation of the scheme. The NFC also decided that the C&I to be adopted by the NTCC need to be based on the ITTO.
2.0 MANDATES
In may 1998, the First ASEAN Senior Official Meeting (ASOF) held in Kuala Lumpur, had adopted three initiatives proposed by Malaysia i.e. (i) Forestry Information System; (ii) Demonstration Forest Area Network on Sustainable Forest Management in ASEAN; and (iii) Development of Regional Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management. At the last ASOF meeting it was agreed that Malaysian RCFM be made the focal agency to implement these initiatives. The 20th AMAF meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam from 17 – 18 September 1998 had also agreed to the proposed initiatives and decided that the three initiatives be combined and called Sustainable Forest Management in ASEAN.
Pertaining to this, especially the later initiative, it was agreed that ASEAN member countries should share their experiences in the formulation, development and implementation of their respective national C&I’s for sustainable forest management. Subsequent to that, the Special SOM-AMAF held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 20 – 22 April, 1999 endorsed the initiative to develop regional criteria and indicators for the ASEAN region.
The decisions of ASOF and SOM-AMAF are consistent with recommendations made by the intergovernmental Panel of Forest (IPF) during 4th Session in New York in 1997. Relevant recommendations are as follows:
i) To encourage countries to proceed and to prepares through a participatory approach, national-level criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management taking cognizance of specific country conditions and on the basis of internationally and regionally agreed initiatives, to initiate and implement them, where appropriate, while recognizing that further scientific and technical examination, including field testing, will itself provide valuable experience and assist in further refinement and development;
ii) To urge countries to proceed as appropriate, the use of internationally, regionally, sub-regionally agreed criteria and indicators as a framework for promoting best forest practices and in facilitating sustainable forest management to encourage the formulation and implementation of criteria and indicators on a cross-sectoral basis and with the full participation of all interested parties; to include them in national forest programmes; to establish and where appropriate clarify links between criteria and indicators employed at the national level and at the subnational or at the forest management unit operational levels; and to promote their compatibility at all levels;
iii) To urge countries and international organizations, in particular FAO, UNEP and other participants international and regional initiatives, to undertake efforts to achieve a common international understanding on concepts, essential terms and definitions used in formulating and developing criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management (and to promote their adoption); on indicators as tools for assessing trends in forest management and conditions at the national level; and on transparent methods for the measurement of indicators and the collection, assembly; storage and dissemination of data.
3.0 FRAMEWORK OF CRITERIA AND INDICATORS
In recent years, the forestry community had devoted a tremendous amount of time and attention to developing various sets of principles and standards for sustainable management in many ecological zones of the world. Several frameworks/ initiatives have been instated towards the formulation of the criteria and indicators involving principles, criteria, indicators, activities, management specifications, attributes etc. This has been clearly manifested by the ITTO Criteria for the Measurement of Sustainable Tropical Forest Management. The European Process on Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management (Helsinki Process); Montreal Process; Tarapoto Proposal of Criteria and Indicators for Sustainability of the Amazon Forest (Tarapoto Process); UNEP/FAO Initiative for the Dry-Zone Africa; FAO/UNEP Initiative and FAO/CCAD initiative i.e for Central American Commission for Environment and Development CCAD).
These open and transparent process have engaged a wide range of expertise to formulate their own set of C&I for Sustainable Forest Management. These various processes are comparable and all of them share a common framework that involves the following three principle elements i.e. (i) maintaining forests as healthy ecosystems; (ii) maintaining sustainable flow of socio-economic benefits; and (iii) maintaining effective institutions and policy implementation.
For the tropical countries, the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) had developed guidelines for the sustainable management of natural and planted forests, conservation of biodiversity of tropical production forests and tropical forest management. Action also has been taken to revise the regional criteria and indicators in view of the recently adopted ITTO’s Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Management of Natural Tropical Forests (ITTO Policy Development Series 7) which was based on the original ITTO’s Criteria for the Measurement of Sustainable Tropical Forest Management and other initiatives.
This further denotes that the ASEAN member countries should now have developed or rather improved their own sets of C&I before year 2000 in order to meet the Year 2000 Objective set by ITTO, and as well should institutionalize the sustainability assessment which is appropriate to national conditions. To this effect, the ITTO guidelines have been accepted and adapted by some countries in the ASEAN region to suit their national requirements and needs. After two series of ASEAN Experts Meeting on Regional Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management, a set of ASEAN Regional Criteria and Indicators appears as Attachment 1.
4.0 APPLICATION
At present, ASEAN member countries are at varying stages of their C&I development. With the current scenario in forestry sector, there a number of related issues and challenges pertaining to the C&I development that need to be addressed by the concerned government and private institutions which includes criteria setting, institutionalization of certification, eco-labelling procedures, costing, competitiveness in the market niche, economic valuation and transparency, and the harmonization of approaches to sustainability assessment. As efforts towards sustainable forestry continue to evolve, the assessment and certification of forest management practices and/or systems should also be implemented and refined accordingly.
Therefore, given the wide differences in natural and social conditions among countries, the specific application and monitoring of the criteria and indicators, as well as the capacity to apply them, will vary from country to country based on national circumstances. It is anticipated that individual countries would develop specific measurement schemes appropriate to national conditions to address how data would be gathered for assessment.
An attempt had been made to study the differences between ITTO Criteria & Indicators, Regional and ASEAN member countries i.e. Malaysia (Attachment 2).
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