Tracking system and tropical forest products

Ecocertification, ecolabeling, in addition to other communication tools using environmental and/or good managemnet criteria, are theoretically designed to promote good managemnet practices among forest resources through potential market sanctions or promotions. It is assumed that concerned consumers would prefer products associated with the best resource management practices. However, assuming that one piece of wood comes from a well managed forest is not helpful when it cannot be certified that the material will not be assembled or mixed with other material of dubios origin along the different stages of the supply chain, from the forest to the final consumer. Most ecocertification tools based on environmental and /or good management criteria, thus use at least two quality control tools or quality systems tools. These are identification and tracking systems

Governing forest plantation to reduce poverty and improve forest landscape: a multiagent simulation approach

Good forest governance lets all relevant stakeholders participate in the decision-making processes. Illegal logging and forest degradation are currently increasing, and logging bans are ineffective in reducing forest degradation. At the same time interest in forest plantations and concern about poverty problems of people adjacent to forests continue to increase rapidly. Governments have identified the development of small forest plantations as an opportunity to provide wood supplies to forest industries and to reduce poverty. However, the development of small plantations is very slow due to an imbalance of power and suspicion between communities and large companies. Current regulations do not offer many links amongst various stakeholders. The paper proposes a framework to link up social, economic and biophysical dynamics using multiagent simulation to explore scenarios of collaboration for plantations. Multiagent simulation is a branch of artificial intelligence that offers a promising approach to deal with multi stakeholder management systems, such as the case involving common pool of resources. It provides a framework, which allows analysis of stakeholders’ (or agents’) decisions in interaction. Each stakeholder has explicit communication capacities, behaviors and rational from which emerge specific actions. The purpose of this modeling is to create a common dynamic representation to facilitate negotiations to grow trees. Collaborations involving multistakeholders, especially local communities and wood based industries, appeared to offer the most promising pathway to accelerate plantation development toward local communities’ poverty alleviation and forest landscape improvement

Modeling multi-stakeholder forest management: the case of forest plantations in Sabah

This paper proposes a framework to link social, economic, and biophysical dynamics using multi-agent simulation to explore scenarios of collaboration for forest plantation management. The modeling is based on decision theories. The purpose of this modeling is to produce shared knowledge about dynamics to facilitate coordination among stakeholders; its learning tool about forest management. The main hypothesis is that stakeholders, by creating a virtual world with researchers, will leran about the effects that their own decisions might have on themselves, others, and the environment. In the case of Sabah, it is at the stage of the first loop of learning, and scenarios need to be further tested with the stakeholders themselves. This forest plantation simulation suggests that the development of sawmills adapted to plantation wood might offer a promising pathway for increasing added value and the benefits of many stakeholders, including local communities

Development of criteria and indicators for forest plantations from assessment toward communication tools for management

The rapid loss of forest resources from teak plantations in Java is a serious problem that is raising interest in finding new systems of management that will ensure sustained availability of resources. At the same time, all around the world a growing number of stakeholders are becoming involved in forest management. Sustainable forest management (SFM) has become the goal for many countries and stakeholders. But the definition of sustainability may differ significantly among stakeholders, who often have different perceptions and interests. Achieving a common definition of sustainability is the first step needed for stakeholders involved in forest management to reach agreement on goals. An impressive amount of work has already been done to develop criteria and indicators (C&I) for forest sustainability. CIFOR's pioneering work in this area has included efforts to develop a set of C&I for forest plantations. This article describes the process involved in developing these C&I. The process is collaborative and cross-disciplinary, and particularly aims to improve the communication among experts

Assessing stakeholder agreements: a new research focus for CIFOR's plantation programme in Southeast Asia

The total amount of industrial plantations around the world is still small compared with the total are of global forests, but plantation forestry in the tropics is expected to increase quickly because of growing demand for timber and the depletion of wood from natural forests. Forestry plantations in the tropics have a comparative advantage over temperate plantations in terms of potentially higher yields. Tropical countries are trying to encourage greater private-sector investment in forestry plantations and downstream wood industries. In many countries, however, land ownership and access is disputed by a variety of stakeholders. A major challenge for plantation companies is to reach agreements with these stakeholders to ensure a supply of raw material. Agreements between plantation companies and communities or other stakeholders offer a means of meeting the different objectives of various groups. Yet, in actual forest planning decisions, some stakeholders have more power than the others. This is especially true when large international companies are dealing with local communities whose residents may have little understanding of what an agreement entails. In such a context whether agreements are sustainable is questionable. CIFOR's Plantation Programme is engaged in research to develop tools and methods for assessing and monitoring the viability of such agreements between plantation companies and other stakeholders