•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.
The EU's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan (FLEGT) adopted in 2003 includes bilateral trade agreements known as Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) signed between the EU ...and timber-supplying countries. The EU has invested more than 1.5 billion euros in VPAs; however, only one of the seven concerned countries has managed to complete all the necessary requirements to expire FLEGT licences. Since there is no research that comprehensively integrates the scientific evidence regarding the effects of this policy, this study systematically reviews all empirical scientific studies on the effects of VPAs. We found that almost all relevant studies are case reports that use qualitative data and focus on only one country at a time, mainly Ghana, Cameroon, or Indonesia. The evidence suggests that while VPAs have contributed to the establishment of governance structures, tools, and procedures they have not been able to solve social problems (i.e., inequality and injustice) and have potentially harmed the economies of EU timber suppliers. Evidence on the effects of VPAs on illegal logging and trade and the environment remains limited. Thus, future research should focus on more countries; use a greater range of methods, including comparative experimental designs; explore possible intended effects on under-researched categories; and systematically investigate unintended effects on other categories within and outside the forestry sector.
•We reviewed the literature on the effects of FLEGT Voluntary Partnership Agreements.•These are bilateral trade agreements between the EU and timber-supplying countries.•Most studies are case reports using qualitative data, focusing on one country at a time.•VPAs can contribute to the establishment of governance structures tools, and procedures.•VPAs are not able to solve social problems and can even harm the economy.
This study aims to identify and analyze the intensity of research developments with the topic of forest fire controlling policy in Indonesia in the last five years from 2017 to 2021 through ...bibliometric analysis. The research method uses a literature review with data collection through the publish or perish software from the google scholar database with the keywords “forest fire Indonesia,” “forest fire management, Indonesia,” forest fire control, Indonesia,” and “forest fire policy, Indonesia.” Data analysis using the VOSviewer application. The results showed 154 journal articles discussing forest fire controlling policy in Indonesia between 2017 and 2021 accessed on December 18, 2021. The term "implementation" became the most central and widely discussed term in previous studies. As a comparison, in 2021, the terms "coordination policy" and "annual forest fire” will be the last issues to be discussed. The limitation of this study is research using the Google Scholar database. It is open to all articles, including journals, reports, papers assignments, and articles that have been uploaded to the Google database. In addition, incomplete metadata such as year and source of publication become undetectable when filtered. Following research, more analysis will be conducted using other indexing databases like Scopus or Web of Science.
This editorial tackles a very intriguing issue: should the foresters be involved in policy? Such a question really makes sense because in the last almost three decades, Romanian foresters have been ...complaining about forestry politicizing in the sense that forest resources and forestry staff have been used by ruling parties as electoral means, without any concern for forest sustainability. It has happened so because the forest policy must be contextualized in a broader perspective of conceiving and keeping consistent quite a long array of public policies, where the environmental protection public policy actually engulfs the forest policy. The argument that some professional groups shall keep away from making policy is logically dismantled by the fact that conceiving public policies implies a lot of technicalities that cannot be grasp without having a deeper understanding of what is going in different sectoral economies. Keeping some professionals, like physicians, foresters and militaries out of the political parties is not good at all for these domains (supposedly public policies) because all technical provisions will have been produced or amended by non-processionals. Especially the parties based on the neo-liberal doctrine shall be heavily packed with foresters for the simple reason that liberal politicians, in general, are prone to disregard the positive externalities produced by forests. In general, any political party shall have more technical lenses for domains where its own political doctrine tends to be sightless.
There are currently competing demands on Europe's forests and the finite resources and services that they can offer. Forestry intensification that aims at mitigating climate change and biodiversity ...conservation is one example. Whether or not these two objectives compete can be evaluated by comparative studies of forest landscapes with different histories. We test the hypothesis that indicators of wood production and biodiversity conservation are inversely related in a gradient of long to short forestry intensification histories. Forest management data containing stand age, volume and tree species were used to model the opportunity for wood production and biodiversity conservation in five north European forest regions representing a gradient in landscape history from very long in the West and short in the East. Wood production indicators captured the supply of coniferous wood and total biomass, as well as current accessibility by transport infrastructure. Biodiversity conservation indicators were based on modelling habitat network functionality for focal bird species dependent on different combinations of stand age and tree species composition representing naturally dynamic forests. In each region we randomly sampled 25 individual 100-km2 areas with contiguous forest cover. Regarding wood production, Sweden's Bergslagen region had the largest areas of coniferous wood, followed by Vitebsk in Belarus and Zemgale in Latvia. NW Russia's case study regions in Pskov and Komi had the lowest values, except for the biomass indicator. The addition of forest accessibility for transportation made the Belarusian and Swedish study region most suitable for wood and biomass production, followed by Latvia and two study regions in NW Russian. Regarding biodiversity conservation, the overall rank among regions was opposite. Mixed and deciduous habitats were functional in Russia, Belarus and Latvia. Old Scots pine and Norway spruce habitats were only functional in Komi. Thus, different regional forest histories provide different challenges in terms of satisfying both wood production and biodiversity conservation objectives in a forest management unit. These regional differences in northern Europe create opportunities for exchanging experiences among different regional contexts about how to achieve both objectives. We discuss this in the context of land-sharing versus land-sparing.
•Resolving rival demands on Europe's boreal forest requires evidence-based knowledge.•Forest history gradients form a natural experiment to assess levels of rivalry.•Indicators of wood production and biodiversity conservation were inversely related.•Regional differences in northern Europe offer unique opportunities for learning.
•We summarise relationships between indicators and indicandums in European forests.•We assess the strength of scientific evidence of individual forest biodiversity indicators.•Many correlations ...between indicator and indicandum were not statistically tested.•Only 6 correlations (out of 412) have strong scientific evidence.•Biodiversity indicators in European forest policies have poor scientific evidence.
With a growing number of forest biodiversity indicators being applied in forest policy documents and even more being suggested by the scientific community, there is a need to evaluate, review and critically assess the strength of evidence for individual indicators, their interrelationships and potential overlaps and gaps. Biodiversity indicators proposed for forest ecosystems in Europe were reviewed with the overarching aim of providing advice on strategic selection and combination of indictors. The objectives were to (1) establish interrelationships between indicators and their indicandum (i.e. the indicated aspect of biodiversity); (2) assess the strength of scientific evidence for individual indicators; and (3) identify a set of indicators with confirmed validity for further scientific testing and inclusion in long-term reporting and decision-making regarding forest biodiversity. Ten indicator groups and 83 individual indicators were identified with application from stand scale up to landscape scale in 142 eligible scientific papers. In 62 of the 142 studies no statistical correlations between indicator(s) and indicandum were performed and 42 (out of the 62) did not even present a clear indicandum. In the remaining 80 studies, 412 correlations between indicator and indicandum were identified. However, only six correlations were assessed as being supported by strong evidence, i.e. three or more studies found statistical correlation between the indicator and indicandum, and no studies reported contradictory results. For the species richness relationships, there was strong evidence for positive correlations between deadwood volume and wood-living fungal species richness; deadwood volume and saproxylic beetle species richness; deadwood diversity and saproxylic beetle species richness; age of canopy trees and epiphytic lichen species richness. There was strong evidence for a negative correlation between tree canopy cover and spider species richness. Concerning species composition-related correlation, there was strong evidence that the species composition of epiphytic lichens changed with the age of canopy trees. These results imply that the validity of most indicators on which monitoring and conservation planning are based are weakly scientifically supported and that further validation of current biodiversity indicators for forest ecosystems is needed.
Europe's forest provide multiple ecosystem services for societies, ranging from provisioning (e.g. wood) and regulating (e.g. climate mitigation and biodiversity) to cultural (e.g. recreation) ...services. In this paper, we assess the state and prospects of forest ecosystem services provision in Europe, introducing new data from the European collaborative research projects SINCERE, NOBEL and CLEARING HOUSE, and combining it with findings from the literature. We identify six challenges (1 an insufficient alignment of FES supply and demand, 2 lacking policy integration, 3 ambiguous and conflicting regulatory frameworks, 4 a lack of precise information on FES demand and provision, and innovations to align both, 5 an increasing pressure to adapt to climate change, and 6 a striking diversity constraining European level policy solutions) and three opportunities (1 increasingly heterogenous forest owner objectives potentially matching pluralistic societal demands, 2 diversifying forest enterprises levering innovations in regulating and cultural ecosystem services provision, and 3 the potential of forests to mitigate climate change). Subsequently, we introduce four distinct but complimentary policy pathways for European forest policy to better align forest ecosystem services provision and demand: 1 Better monitoring of FES supply and demand, 2 Enhanced policy integration, 3 Payments for ecosystem services, and 4 Bottom-up participation and learning among ecosystem services innovators. We conclude by emphasizing the momentum that the EU Green Deal unfolds for a future European forest policy to incentivise the provision of multiple forest ecosystem services.
•We assess the provision of forest ecosystem services in Europe.•We identify six challenges and three opportunities relating to forest ecosystem services provision.•We identify four policy pathways for future EU forest policy to support ecosystem services provision.
Purpose of Review
As a major component of wood, lignin is regarded as a promising, bio-based compound which could strongly influence the forest-based circular bioeconomy. Much research has been ...conducted on the material use of lignin, but the lignin commercialization process is still under development; few commercial production facilities and larger-scale applications are available. Therefore, we present a review of recent research papers on the economic perspectives on lignin.
Recent Findings
Research has been conducted on lignin application areas such as lignin-derived polymeric materials, polymer and composite systems, applications for microsized and nanosized lignin, energy storage, and renewable chemicals. On the whole, the life cycle assessment results indicate that lignin-based innovations can be environmentally beneficial. Techno-economic studies identified the lignin feedstock cost and the achievable product price as the most sensitive factors. Recently, researchers pointed out information asymmetries between different stakeholder groups concerning lignin-containing products.
Summary
Although most of the relevant papers presented a technical perspective of lignin, a smaller set of general economic statements about lignin appear in these papers. These statements refer to lignin underutilization, limited markets, resource abundancy, and barriers to utilization. The literature on technical lignin with an economic perspective can be divided into two different streams: several techno-economic papers and fewer socio-economic papers. The former placed a primary focus on production processes from a profit maximization perspective, but attempts were also made in the latter to explain the socio-technical innovation system. To date, lignin researchers have focused mainly on internal (direct) factors but have not yet sufficiently considered external (indirect) factors.
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