Kit for Building C&I Guidelines

CIFOR’s pioneering work in developing "criteria and indicators" for sustainable management of forests reached a milestone in 1999 with the publication of the Criteria and Indicators Tool Box. The computer-based kit offers step-by-step instructions for building sets of C&I that can be used in different types of forest settings.

Criteria and indicators are an innovative method for determining whether a forest is healthy and its management is sound, thereby indicating that its resource base is not likely to be permanently eroded. C&I measure a variety of conditions in relation to factors such as biological diversity, current management practices, and the quality of the soil, water and vegetation. Factors reflecting the social and economic well-being of indigenous people who inhabit the forest are also a critical element because these conditions influence whether local people use forest resources carefully or over-exploit them.

Criteria – or standards – are needed to indicate the desired conditions in these various categories; indicators are measures for judging whether those conditions are being met. What particular combination of C&I is suitable for measuring the conditions of any given forest varies according to different forest types and community priorities. The materials in the Tool Box guide users through the process of designing customised C&I.

C&I should work hand in hand with collaborative forest management approaches being developed by CIFOR’s ACM Programme. ACM models will be "adaptive" rather than fixed; that is, adjustments in planning and implementation may be needed as circumstances change. C&I can aid this process by pointing out conditions that may hinder progress toward agreed-upon goals of sustainable forest use.

CIFOR’s work in C&I development, which has been led by Ravi Prabhu and Carol Colfer, is helping to bring more consistency and agreement to the debate on what constitutes sustainable forest management. The issue is important not only for environmental reasons. Increasingly, consumers’ willingness to buy forest-derived products and governments’ decisions to allow timber companies to operate depends on whether the forests that various products came from are viewed as sustainable. Yet the Forest Stewardship Council, the International Timber Trade Organisation and many other organisations have established different criteria for sustainability.

In an earlier stage of this project, CIFOR took interdisciplinary teams of local and international experts to forests in Austria, Brazil, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Germany, Indonesia and the United States. Their task was to evaluate whether individual C&I proposed by different groups seemed useful for judging whether the specific forests being analysed were sustainable. Additional studies on indicators for biodiversity and human well-being were also done.

"Ultimately, sustainability will only be achieved if the people and institutions concerned are prepared to act on the information they have and to seek continuous improvement."
CIFOR Scientist Ravi Prabhu

"The harsh reality is that it is local, often poor, people who bear the cost of blanket biodiversity conservation programmes promoted by the West."
CIFOR Director General Jeffrey A. Sayer

Despite the value-laden nature of the concept of sustainability, the results revealed a surprising level of general agreement about its main components. This allowed the team to identify six basic principles and about 25 criteria related to policy, ecology, social conditions and production that most experts felt were useful. These are the foundation of the C&I Tool Box. It is gradually being translated into several languages, and training workshops are widely in demand.

Key donors supporting this work have included the European Union, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit GmbH, the African Timber Organisation, the Netherlands’ Directorate General for International Cooperation, U.S. Agency for International Development, Ford Foundation, Swiss Development Corporation, MacArthur Foundation and Canada’s International Development Research Centre.

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FLORES: A Dynamic Model for Forest and Land Use Decisions

CIFOR’s project to develop a simulation tool for forest management and land use planning moved from the conceptual stage to construction of an operational prototype in 1999. At an intensive week-long workshop in January, several dozen computer programmers, systems modellers, resource specialists and forestry experts met in Bukittinggi, North Sumatra, to construct a preliminary version of FLORES, the Forest Land Oriented Resource Envisioning System.

Once completed, FLORES will work some-what like SimCity, the popular computer game in which users build an urban environment from the ground up. SimCity is a game, but FLORES is intended as a research and planning tool. By imitating real-life conditions and showing cause-and-effect relationships, it will enable a variety of people – from policy makers and resource managers to local farm organisations and villagers – to make better decisions about forest use and conservation. Where, for example, is the best place to locate a human settlement, carve out a park for wildlife conservation or expand farm land? If you upgrade a road, will it increase deforestation? Is present land use in a certain area causing unintended environmental damage, and if so, what is the best option for correcting the problem?

Because issues like these involve relation-ships between people and the landscape around them, FLORES will be dynamic and interactive. "We are not building a jigsaw where there is only one scenario and we can tell when we get it right," says Dr. Jerry Vanclay, a systems modeller and forester who is coordinating the project. "We are building a mosaic, in which there are innumerable options, and groups of people who might be affected must decide on the ‘best’ solution."

The University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Ecological and Resource Management is a key partner in the project, which has received major funding from the UK’s Department for International Development. Computer scientists from the university developed the original systems modelling package, known as AME, that is being used to create FLORES.

The hands-on session in January demon-strated that what the FLORES team is trying to do is technically feasible and suggested adaptations that were needed. The design team was set to meet in Zimbabwe early in 2000 for the next stage of development.

"If measures to improve yields of food crops and livestock are not based on a full understanding of the needs and options of the poor and do not take account the ecology of the systems being addressed, poverty will not be eradicated."
The Bilderberg Consensus

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A Multidisciplinary Approach to Landscape Assessment

In tropical land use planning and manage-ment, what forests mean to the people who live there usually gets short shrift. As a result, local communities often suffer negative consequences from strategies for biodiversity protection, access to concessions, and other forest use and conservation. In 1999 CIFOR began a pilot project at Bulungan Research Forest that aims to turn this situation around by developing a new approach to biodiversity and landscape assessment that reflects the needs and preferences of forest-dependent people.

This exploratory work, headed by biologist Doug Sheil, is being done as part of broader studies funded by the International Tropical Forest Organisation. The results will contribute significantly to CIFOR’s long-term research at Bulungan. Members of the survey team represent many disciplines, to insure that all the different values forests represent for communities are reflected in the evaluation. The project takes a landscape-scale approach because swidden agriculture, primary and secondary forests, rivers and other land and forest features are closely interrelated in providing communities’ needs.

Guided by the residents of two Dayak villages, Paya Seturan and Long Rian, the researchers compiled a plot-based assessment of plants, animals, soil types, rivers and other aspects of the forest, and ranked these features according to the relative benefits they provided. Local people were found to value the forest most highly as a source of food – mainly meat, fish, sago and fruit – while plants for medicine and for crafts and building materials were also deemed important. "Insurance" was another highly valued benefit. Many people see the forest as a source of essential resources in the event of catastrophes such as crop failures – a major concern in this area where floods and droughts are frequent. Troublesome to many residents is a perceived decline in the animals they hunt, as well as other forest products; for example, rattan has become scarcer in recent years. Concerns such as these are likely to grow as timber and coal companies and other outside interests gain control of more and more of the landscape.

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Toward Integrated Ways of Managing Resources

For nearly 30 years the CGIAR centres have been a powerful force in efforts to end poverty, feed hungry people and ensure long-term food security. Today, the complexity and growing interdependence of the world is forcing the CGIAR to rethink the way it does business. CIFOR has played a major role in promoting a shift away from the CGIAR’s traditional emphasis on increased productivity of commodities and toward research that tackles development problems across ecosystems.

Support for such a change grew within the CGIAR over the past decade. But little follow-up occurred. A workshop in the Netherlands in September organised by the CGIAR Centre Directors Committee catalysed renewed commitment to pursuing a broad-based approach known as integrated natural resource management (INRM). CIFOR’s Director General Jeffrey A. Sayer, chairman of the group’s Committee on Sustainability and the Environment, headed the meeting, which was funded by the Netherlands and the UK’s Department for International Development.

In a joint statement – called "The Bilderberg Consensus" for the location where the meeting was held – the group suggested ways the CGIAR centres and their partner institutions could apply INRM approaches to solving these and other problems. They urged, among other things, more interdisciplinary research, increased use of advanced technologies to improve understanding and analysis, better cooperation between organisations with complementary knowledge and skills, greater attention to the root causes of natural resource degradation, more direct links with development goals and stronger generalisability of findings.

The results were conveyed to the CGIAR’s Technical Advisory Committee and presented at CGIAR’s International Centers Week in Washington, D.C., in October. A follow-up meeting for 2000 is planned. Meanwhile, a Web site created by CIFOR’s Information Services Group is aiding debate on this issue.

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