Industrial timber production can have disastrous effects on biodiversity. However, it doesn’t need to be like that. When sensitively and sustainably managed, production forests can yield a profit for timber companies without destroying biodiversity. The International Tropical Timber Organization’s (ITTO) new biodiversity guidelines show how it can be done. CIFOR scientists helped to formulate and shape the guidelines.

Scientists believe that up to 80 per cent of the world’s terrestrial species are found in tropical forests, thus making them tremendously important for wildlife. Over four-fifths of these forests lie outside protected areas, and much is likely to be lost to agriculture over the coming decades. However, a significant proportion is devoted to the extraction of timber. By ensuring that these forests are harvested sustainably, and other conservation measures are put in place, timber companies can make a major contribution to biodiversity conservation.

‘Bad forest management may be one of the world’s greatest threats to biodiversity, but good forest management can provide a major contribution to conserving this biodiversity.’

ITTO Tropical Forest Update 18/2, 2008

ITTO’s first set of biodiversity guidelines was published in 1993, but much has changed since then. The Convention on Biological Diversity has had a considerable influence on both international and national policy making. At the same time, the science of conservation biology has matured. People’s rights are now more clearly acknowledged than they were in 1993, and forest certification, little more than a glimmer in the eye of conservationists in the early 1990s, has an increasing influence on the management of large areas of forest.

On the downside, forest loss has continued at an alarming rate, with the world continuing to lose an area of forest about the size of Greece each year. These developments, both good and bad, have made it all the more important that forest managers are provided with sound advice on how best to conserve biodiversity in production forests—hence the new guidelines. See http://www.itto.int/direct/topics/topics_pdf_download/topics_id=104257&no=5.

The revision process was managed by ITTO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). They enlisted the help of other organisations with expertise in forest biodiversity, one of these being CIFOR.

‘The guidelines were greatly enriched by CIFOR’s Life after Logging book and by the participation of Robert Nasi and Doug Sheil in the expert panels,’ says Jeff Sayer, science adviser to IUCN. ‘CIFOR also facilitated much of the fieldwork to get feedback from forest managers on the feasibility of the draft guidelines.’ See Life after Logging: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/books/BMeijaard0501E0.pdf.

After a technical panel of experts drafted the revised guidelines, the scientists field tested them in Brazil, Cameroon, Guyana and Indonesia. Sheil helped to review the tests in Guyana. Petrus Gunarso, who worked with CIFOR at the time, did the same for Indonesia. The tests established how realistic and practical the guidelines were and how much they would cost to implement. National workshops were held in each of the four countries and an expert panel, including CIFOR scientists, finalised the guidelines.

The revised guidelines, accepted by ITTO in late 2008, have three parts. The first part provides background information on important biodiversity concepts; the second part is a set of 11 principles and 46 guidelines for maximising biodiversity conservation in production forests; and the third part discusses how to implement the guidelines, based on the field experience in the four test countries. The new guidelines stress the importance of forest managers acquiring the skills needed to make good decisions about when to take measures that favour biodiversity. They also emphasise the need for forest managers to work closely with conservation organisations.

‘In the past, timber harvesting was blamed for a lot of forest destruction, but if we are to protect large areas of forest, logging must also be part of our solution,’ says Sheil, who now works for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Uganda. ‘I am encouraged by the fact that the number of companies who are willing to log sustainably and who are looking for guidance is increasing.’

The guidelines were launched at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) World Forest Week, in Rome, in March 2009. ITTO and IUCN are planning to hold a session on the biodiversity guidelines at the World Forestry Congress, in Argentina in October 2009, to promote them to forest managers.

See: http://www.itto.int/en/policypapers_guidelines/.  

1. Logging in Iwokrama, Guyana.
   Photo by Douglas Sheil
2. L’Hoest’s Monkey (Cercopithecus lhoesti).
   Photo by Douglas Sheil
3. Nepenthes, a rare flower species
   in Indonesia.
   Photo by Widya Prajanthi