This book contributes to the debate regarding the origins, institutionalization, and politics of the sciences and systems of knowledge underlying colonial frameworks of environmental management. It ...departs from the widely prevalent scholarly perspective that colonial science can be understood predominantly as a handmaiden of imperialism. Instead, it argues that the myriad colonial sciences had ideological and interventionist traditions distinct from each other and from the colonial bureaucracy, and that these tensions better explain environmental politics and policy dilemmas in the post-colonial era. The author argues that tropical forestry in the 19th century consisted of at least two distinct approaches towards nature, resource, and people; and what won out in the end was the Continental European forestry paradigm. He also shows that science and scientists were relatively marginal until the First World War. It was the acute scientific and resource crisis felt during the War, along with the rise of experts and expertise in Britain during that period and the lobby-politics of an organized empire-wide scientific community, that resulted in resource management regimes such as forestry beginning to get serious state backing. Over time, considerable differences in approach and outlook towards policy emerged between different colonial scientific communities, such as foresters and agriculturists. These different colonial sciences represented different situated knowledges, with different visions of nature, people, and empire, and in different configurations of power. Finally, in a panoramic overview of post-colonial developments, the author argues that the hegemony of these state-scientific regimes of resource management during the period 1950-1990 engendered not just social revolt, as recent historical work has shown, but also intellectual protest. Consequently, the discipline of forestry became systematically re-conceptualized, with new approaches to sylviculture, economics, law, and crucially, new visions of modernity. This disciplinary change constitutes nothing short of a cognitive revolution, one that has been brought about by a clearly articulated political perspective on the orientation of the discipline of forestry by its practitioners.
•Some 1.1 billion ha are covered by all of the SFM tools investigated in FRA 2015.•Policies, laws and regulations supporting SFM cover 98% of permanent forest land.•Forest inventories have recently ...been conducted in 112 countries.•Some 52% of the total forest area was under Forest Management Plan (FMP) in 2010.•International forest certification was most extensive in high income countries.•There are positive increases in most SFM indicators globally.
Sustainable forest management (SFM) is many things to many people – yet a common thread is the production of forest goods and services for the present and future generations. The promise of sustainability is rooted in the two premises; first that ecosystems have the potential to renew themselves and second that economic activities and social perceptions or values that define human interaction with the environment are choices that can be modified to ensure the long term productivity and health of the ecosystem. SFM addresses a great challenge in matching the increasing demands of a growing human population while maintaining ecological functions of healthy forest ecosystems. This paper does not seek to define SFM, but rather provides analyses of key indicators for the national-scale enabling environment to gain a global insight into progress in implementing enabling and implementing SFM at the national and operational levels. Analyses of the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 (FRA) country report data are used to provide insights into the current state of progress in implementing the enabling conditions for SFM. Over 2.17 billion ha of the world’s forest area are predicted by governments to remain in permanent forest land use, of which some 1.1 billion ha are covered by all of the SFM tools investigated in FRA 2015. At the global scale, SFM-related policies and regulations are reported to be in place on 97% of global forest area. While the number of countries with national forest inventories has increased over that past ten years from 48 to 112, only 37% of forests in low income countries are covered by forest inventories. Forest management planning and monitoring of plans has increased substantially as has forest management certification, which exceeded a total of over 430 million ha in 2014. However, 90% of internationally verified certification is in the boreal and temperate climatic domains – only 6% of permanent forests in the tropical domain have been certified as of 2014. Results show that more work is needed to expand the extent and depth of work on establishing the enabling conditions that support SFM over the long term and suggests where those needs are greatest.
Instituting nature Mathews, Andrew S
2011, 20111104, 2011-11-04, 2013-06-26, 20110101
eBook, Book
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state.
Satellite top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance has been validated as an effective index for estimating PMsub.2.5 concentrations due to its high spatial coverage and relatively high spatial resolution ...(i.e., 1 km). For this paper, we developed an emsembled random forest (RF) model incorporating satellite top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance with four categories of supplemental parameters to derive the PMsub.2.5 concentrations in the region of the Yangtze River Delta-Fujian (i.e., YRD-FJ) located in east China. The landscape pattern indices at two levels (i.e., type level and overall level) retrieved from 3-year land classification imageries (i.e., 2016, 2018, and 2020) were used to discuss the correlation between county-based PMsub.2.5 values and landscape pattern. We achieved a cross validation Rsup.2 of 0.91 (RMSE = 9.06 μg/msup.3), 0.89 (RMSE = 10.19 μg/msup.3), and 0.90 (RMSE = 8.02 μg/msup.3) between the estimated and observed PMsub.2.5 concentrations in 2016, 2018, and 2020, respectively. The PMsub.2.5 distribution retrieved from the RF model showed a trend of a year-on-year decrease with the pattern of "Jiangsu > Shanghai > Zhejiang > Fujian" in the YRD-FJ region. Our results also revealed that the landscape pattern of farmland, water bodies, and construction land exhibited a highly positive relationship with the county-based average PMsub.2.5 values, as the r coefficients reached 0.74 while the forest land was negatively correlated with the county-based PMsub.2.5 (r = 0.84). There was also a significant correlation between the county-based PMsub.2.5 and shrubs (r = 0.53), grass land (r = 0.76), and bare land (r = 0.60) in the YRD-FJ region, respectively. Three landscape pattern indices at an overall level were positively correlated with county-based PMsub.2.5 concentrations (r = 0.80), indicating that the large landscape fragmentation, edge density, and landscape diversity would raise the PMsub.2.5 pollution in the study region.
Cracking Brazil's Forest Code Soares-Filho, Britaldo; Rajão, Raoni; Macedo, Marcia ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
04/2014, Letnik:
344, Številka:
6182
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Brazil's controversial new Forest Code grants amnesty to illegal deforesters, but creates new mechanisms for forest conservation.
Roughly 53% of Brazil's native vegetation occurs on private ...properties. Native forests and savannahs on these lands store 105 ± 21 GtCO
2
e (billion tons of CO
2
equivalents) and play a vital role in maintaining a broad range of ecosystem services (
1
). Sound management of these private landscapes is critical if global efforts to mitigate climate change are to succeed. Recent approval of controversial revisions to Brazil's Forest Code (FC)—the central piece of legislation regulating land use and management on private properties—may therefore have global consequences. Here, we quantify changes resulting from the FC revisions in terms of environmental obligations and rights granted to land-owners. We then discuss conservation opportunities arising from new policy mechanisms in the FC and challenges for its implementation.
Los bosques secos tropicales (BST) son uno de los ecosistemas más amenazados de Colombia, con remanentes de estos concentrados en bosques riparios. Este trabajo estudió la vegetación de un bosque ...ripario ubicado dentro de un remanente de BST en la cuenca alta del rÃo Magdalena mediante el uso de transectos en tres estaciones a lo largo del arroyo La AverÃa (Paicol, Huila, Colombia). Se encontraron 199 individuos distribuidos en 47 especies. La composición florÃstica fue semejante a la de otros BST, mientras que el número de individuos fue menor. Fabaceae fue la familia más representada y Zygia longifolia y Guadua angustifolia las especies con mayor Ãndice de Valor de Importancia (IVI). Se concluyó que el bosque ha sido sometido a perturbaciones antrópicas y se encuentra en una etapa sucesional temprana. Además, se encontraron diferencias en el grado de conservación del bosque entre las tres estaciones muestreadas.
Sarah B. Pralle takes an in-depth look at why some environmental conflicts expand to attract a lot of attention and participation, while others generate little interest or action.Branching Out, ...Digging Inexamines the expansion and containment of political conflict around forest policies in the United States and Canada. Late in 1993 citizens from around the world mobilized on behalf of saving old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound. Yet, at the same time only a very few took note of an even larger reserve of public land at risk in northern California. Both cases, the Clayoquot Sound controversy in British Columbia and the Quincy Library Group case in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California, centered around conflicts between environmentalists seeking to preserve old-growth forests and timber companies fighting to preserve their logging privileges. Both marked important episodes in the history of forest politics in their respective countries but with dramatically different results. The Clayoquot Sound controversy spawned the largest civil disobedience in Canadian history; international demonstrations in Japan, England, Germany, Austria, and the United States; and the most significant changes in British Columbia's forest policy in decades. On the other hand, the California case, with four times as many acres at stake, became the poster child for the "collaborative conservation" approach, using stakeholder collaboration and negotiation to achieve a compromise that ultimately broke down and ended up in the courts. Pralle analyzes how the various political actors-local and national environmental organizations, local residents, timber companies, and different levels of government-defined the issues in both words and images, created and reconfigured alliances, and drew in different governmental institutions to attempt to achieve their goals. She develops a dynamic new model of conflict management by advocacy groups that puts a premium on nimble timing, flexibility, targeting, and tactics to gain the advantage and shows that how political actors go about exploiting these opportunities and overcoming constraints is a critical part of the policy process.