Peter Wood

Authors: Constance L. McDermott, Aran O’Carroll and Peter Wood

This report, commissioned by the Secretariat of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF), seeks to provide a systematic assessment of how the world’s multi-lateral instruments, processes and agreements address the major environmental, social and economic benefits that forests provide. In so doing, it aims to improve transparency and promote better coordination among existing international forest-related efforts.
This research builds upon a wealth of literature on international forest governance, including other comparative studies of forest-related multi-lateral environmental agreements. The unique contribution of this work is its detailed, systematic and comprehensive identification of specific substantive areas of overlap, duplication, contradictions and/or policy gaps, using a framework based on commonly accepted themes and associated criteria of sustainable forest management.

At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, popularly known as the Rio Earth Summit, the world’s leaders constructed a new "sustainable development" paradigm that promised to enhance environmentally sound economic and social development. Twenty years later, the proliferation of multilateral environmental agreements points to an unprecedented achievement, but is worth examining for its accomplishments and shortcomings.

This book provides a review of twenty years of multilateral environmental negotiations (1992-2012). The authors have participated in most of these negotiating processes and use their first-hand knowledge as writers for the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin as they illustrate the changes that have taken place over the past twenty years. The chapters examine the proliferation of meetings, the changes in the actors and their roles (governments, nongovernmental organizations, secretariats), the interlinkages of issues, the impact of scientific advice, and the challenges of implementation across negotiating processes, including the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention to Combat Desertification, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Commission on Sustainable Development, the UN Forum on Forests, the chemicals conventions (Stockholm, Basel and Rotterdam), the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Convention on Migratory Species and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

This dissertation examines changes that companies made in order to obtain Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, and the role that provincial governments have played in the implementation of this emerging market-based form of governance. It analyzes the indirect roles that governments have played in either encouraging or inhibiting the adoption of certification through their policies, as well as the direct roles played in response to particular certification attempts that occurred on public land. Through the use of case studies of individual operations in each province, the interaction between state and non-state authority is explored, as well as the role that forest tenure played in each operation's ability to obtain certification.The results reveal that the changes required to obtain certification were substantial but associated with only a small subset of the FSC's Principles and Criteria, heavily weighted towards environmental issues. While corrective action requests are issued to the company pursuing certification, the results show that non-exclusive tenure limits a company's ability to respond to these requests without the cooperation of the provincial government and resource users with overlapping tenure rights. However, limited duration of forest tenure does not preclude certification, and for the most part, provincial governments are found to play important facilitative roles in certification, both through their policies and regulations, and as providers of information and technical support.Further, the majority of the corrective actions were not required to be implemented prior to certification being awarded, but within the five year term of the certificate. This appears to have acted as a flexibility mechanism, allowing the certification system to secure the participation of companies in the short term, with the hope of leveraging greater change in the long term from the company, the government in question, and other resource users with overlapping tenure rights.

This report has been prepared at the request of the Ontario Forest Industries Association. (OFIA), with the objective of providing a brief summary and comparison of the overarching policy and legislation surrounding the following eight key issues pertaining to forest management in Canada:
1. Clearcut Size
2. Protected Areas
3. Aboriginal Issues
4. Pesticide and Herbicide Use
5. Fragmentation
6. Rate of Cut/ Modelling
7. Public Participation
8. Old Growth
This was done across four jurisdictions: British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, selected as the principal producers of Canadian forest products.
This report is divided according to each of these eight topics. Within each topic, higher-level policy and legislation and statutes are presented for each province, as well as specific requirements that may be applicable to individual forest operators at the management unit level. Where appropriate, the section concludes with a comparative table for quick reference. The nature of some of the topics discussed does not lend itself to drawing conclusions regarding comparative merit, in which case a descriptive approach is used.

This report for Rainforest Foundation Norway provides an overview and analysis of recent research on the viability of socio-environmentally sustainable logging for commercial purposes in tropical rainforests.
Key questions we wanted to explore in this study included: What are the environmental effects of so-called “sustainable” industrial logging in intact rainforest areas, and to what extent is it possible to extract timber from primary rainforests without significantly disturbing and over time degrading the forest ecosystem regarding biodiversity, climate resilience and carbon storage?
This report examines what is known regarding the impacts of “status quo” industrial logging, including on biodiversity, biomass/carbon, ecosystem resiliency, and timber yield. It then turns to examine whether reduced impact logging (RIL) and forest certification improve outcomes for these same values. Based on these findings, an overall determination is made regarding what constitutes “sustainable forest management” (SFM) in the tropics.
The report finds that industrial logging, even though it is done “selectively” due to the low density of commercially viable trees, results in a large impact to the remaining forest. While some of this occurs immediately during logging and construction of related infrastructure, there are also secondary impacts that can be even more significant. Decreased ecosystem resilience and removal of moisture-retaining canopy results in disruption of ecosystem processes and increased incidence of fire.

International forest policy negotiations have often been characterized by political entrenchment: as early as at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro there was a failure to develop a legally binding forest convention, and subsequent policy fora have often struggled to reach consensus. During its fifth annual session in 2005, the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) began to show signs of a process in deep trouble, failing to achieve agreement on even the most innocuous voluntary commitments. At its sixth session in 2006, the Forum was successful in that members were able to agree on four ‘global objectives on forests’ and initiated the negotiation of a non-legally binding instrument. While this is a cause for optimism, it remains unclear whether the process is completely out of the woods yet or where it is likely to go from here. This article will identify the obstacles to consensus that the UNFF has encountered and discuss whether the most recent session has managed to surmount these. Finally, options to increase future political support and member accountability are presented, including increasing participation in national reporting and reinvigorating the Forum's programme of work.

The international forest regime is characterized by a large number of actors, policy instruments and institutions. Increasingly, forests are being dealt with outside the traditional forest sector and by non-state actors (as exemplified by forest certification). Furthermore, a comprehensive body of knowledge exists in political science about international regimes and global environmental governance. However, no comprehensive scientific assessment has yet been carried out about the international forest regime. Based on the assignment given by the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, the GFEP assessment on the International Forest Regime aims to fill this gap.

More specifically, the assessment aims to contribute to

    the international forest deliberations and international  forest-related processes such as the ninth session of the United Nations Forum on Forests (January  2011), the tenth Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (October 2010), and the discussion on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD);
    the improvement of coordination among political actors, policy instruments and institutions;
    the International Year of Forests 2011 by raising awareness about the role of international instruments and institutions

In this report, the authors claim that "Industrial logging is a major source of carbon emissions, a primary driver of deforestation and threatens to derail the UN process to reduce deforestation". They say that industrial logging puts the remaining forest on a path towards further degradation from fire, drought, pests and disease, illegal logging, poaching, and conversion to other land uses such as industrial agriculture - leading to more carbon emissions. They believe that if REDD is to deliver meaningful and lasting reductions in emissions and provide a tool for adaptation to climate change, ending industrial logging in natural tropical forests, including under the guise of sustainable forest management, must be part of the solution.