The Future of the World's Forests

The ongoing degradation of world’s forests is currently a second-largest reason for growing global greenhouse gas emissions. This destruction is being driven by increased demand for forestry products and poor law enforcement. So far the world has not come up with any effective mechanisms for reversing this trend. Existing international agreements and plans aimed at protecting forests have had little impact. The world is looking to market mechanisms to encourage businesses and other users of forest resources to finance forest preservation. However, the future of world forests will fundamentally depend on the national policies of a few countries, including Russia.

The ongoing degradation of world’s forests is currently a second-largest reason for growing global greenhouse gas emissions. This destruction is being driven by increased demand for forestry products and poor law enforcement. So far the world has not come up with any effective mechanisms for reversing this trend. Existing international agreements and plans aimed at protecting forests have had little impact. The world is looking to market mechanisms to encourage businesses and other users of forest resources to finance forest preservation. However, the future of world forests will fundamentally depend on the national policies of a few countries, including Russia.

What You Did Not Know about Forests

Forests often appear distant from the modern world, something from fairy tales or a place to go mushroom picking. Unfortunately, the important role of forests as ecosystems enabling the development of the modern world is only beginning to be fully appreciated. Today, forests occupy 31% of the world's land surface, providing food, shelter and a wide range of benefits for 1.6 billion people. 300 million people depend on forests for their daily needs, and 54 million work in the forestry sector. 40% of the population of Africa, Asia and Latin America rely on wood as an energy source. Forests provide clean water and medicines, protect against floods, landslides, avalanches and desertification, and offer space for recreation and worship. Forests, however, have been in decline all over the world for some time due to increasing population growth and industrialization. The world’s forest area has decreased by about 40% over the last three centuries. Forests have completely disappeared in 25 countries, and another 29 countries have lost over 90% of their forest cover.

The immediate causes of forest degradation are predominantly related to inadequate forest management, illegal or unsustainable logging, and other human-induced disturbances, such as fires and pollution. Around half of all deforestation results from a failure to optimize land use. Forests are being degraded by overgrazing and cleared for livestock production. In addition, forest land is being converted for agriculture or settlements, whereas other idle yet suitable land remains unused because of armed conflicts, insecure land tenure, etc. Today, although forest cover in much of the northern hemisphere is expanding, biodiversity is being lost, and natural forests in the tropics continue to shrink at an annual rate of over 10 million hectares per year. Unless urgent action is taken to shift historical patterns of forest destruction, the world could see the loss of 232 million hectares of forest by 2050 .

graphs.net
Infographics. Forests, ecosystem management.

When analyzing the future of forests, two important facts emerge: about 77% of world forests are owned by governments and over half of world's forests are in five countries - Canada, the USA, Brazil, Russia and China.

Current trends in forestry are shaped by consumer demand, which is changing in two ways. On the one hand, consumer demand is increasing as a result of expanding world population with its needs for timber, firewood, and forest products. On the other hand, Western consumers have set a trend for sustainably sourced forest products, forcing companies to turn to more environmentally friendly logging techniques.

When analyzing the future of forests, two important facts emerge: about 77% of world forests are owned by governments and over half of world's forests are in five countries - Canada, the USA, Brazil, Russia and China. This places a particular burden on the national policies of just a few countries.

Forests as a solution to climate change?

Deforestation and forest degradation account for nearly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire global transportation sector and second only to the energy sector. Forests are enormous carbon sinks and increasing the forest cover is being heavily promoted as a cost-effective response to climate change. Today, 7% of total world forests are planted, and some countries have increased the area of their plantation forests; however such schemes are still relatively small in scale.

The key role of forests in climate change mitigation has been recognized by major international conventions (the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification) and multiple initiatives, one of the largest being the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). REDD is an attempt to create financial value for carbon stored in forests by paying developing countries to protect their forests. Despite some successful pilot projects, the effectiveness of REDD is already being questioned and REDD seems unlikely to act as a counterweight to powerful economic and political interests favouring forest exploitation.

Global and Local Collective Action… has failed?

Although the majority of forests continue to be formally owned by governments, the role of international organizations, companies and NGOs has increased, and forest management has become less centralized. A special global platform - the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) - was created to develop an effective international forest policy framework. To this end, thousands of participants meet regularly at high-level UNFF sessions. However, a decision about a global legally binding agreement on forests still has not been made. Today, a non-legally binding mechanism is being used, which means that commitments that have already been, when confronted with national budgetary realities and local institutions, turn into unrealized promises and have little to no impact on actual national-level decision making.

www.cifor.org
Infographics, REDD Program.

International experience with high-level intergovernmental cooperation efforts has shown that global institutes and supranational schemes alone are not capable of saving the forests. This is why Western development agencies have been actively promoting the idea of local communities' involvement in forest governance and setting up projects across the world to engage local populations in forest governance, trying to preserve forests 'from below'. Although small forest owners, indigenous peoples, and rural communities manage a significant share of the world’s forests and have a great impact on forest use, locally controlled forestry has so far not proved universally possible or effective. Collective action is fragmented and rare: forests are often viewed as a low-value, plentiful renewable resource, and the opportunity costs of land and timber use are high - cutting down forests is more lucrative than preserving them. Communities tend to be more concerned with economic problems and expect that the governments should look after forests.

In Search of a New Paradigm: the Market as Savior?

Global negotiations and development have failed to protect the world’s forests. A new paradigm is needed to help address the fundamental problem of forest degradation - the undervaluation of forest resources. Today, many hopes have been placed on two types of potential market-based solutions – a business response to the growing demand for sustainably sourced timber and a market created by governments for forest ecosystem services.

Since the early 1990s, the private sector's input in sustainable forest management has grown - through international voluntary forest certification (such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), corporate sustainability programmes, and public-private partnerships. Timber companies are partially switching to intensively managed forests, which, if well managed, could provide the global industrial wood supply and take pressure off native forests. Companies have also started field trials with genetically modified trees, in order to improve forest productivity. However, the expansion of intensively managed forests is likely to entail serious environmental and social costs, such as increased risks of pest and disease outbreaks in monocultural forests, soil degradation, trade-offs with biodiversity conservation, and negative impacts on local communities who will lose access to their land. And the risks of yield-improving and cost-reducing biotechnologies are not well understood.

Another emerging financing approach involves payments for forest ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are benefits which people obtain from ecosystems: the conservation of biological diversity, the improvement of urban conditions, food for many rural communities, water regulation, production of fuel wood and timber, climate and flood control, soil formation, photosynthesis, recreational opportunities, etc. The idea behind such schemes is that forests are undervalued, which leads to their degradation. We need to correct this market failure by enabling financial transfers from the beneficiaries of ecosystem services (which could be government agencies, non-governmental organizations, companies or individuals) to those who deliver them (i.e. landowners or forest right holders). Although the idea itself is very appealing, there is little clarity as to how it could be implemented in practice.

What about Russian forests?

Greg Grieco, Penn State
Seedlings of transgenic poplar trees in
Penn State lab.

Russian forests, which constitute about a fifth of world’s forest resources, are experiencing the same problems as other regions, although on a different scale. Experts forecast a deep recession in the Russian forest sector. There are very few accessible and economically valuable forests left, and Russia needs to switch to intensive forestry operations. However only about 15% of Russian forests are currently being leased and further investment is difficult to attract. The scale of illegal logging remains catastrophic: official estimates are about 1.5 million of cubic meters, whereas independent estimates say the figure is 30 times higher. At least 25% of annual logging is illegal, and the lost revenue is comparable to the federal funding of the whole forest sector. As a result of ongoing forest reform, the number of foresters has dropped drastically, and Russian forests have remained essentially without monitoring or protection.

Russia is involved in numerous international forestry processes, from UN agreements to forest certification and model forests. However, Russia's participation in all these schemes and discussions has so far had little impact on the state of its forests: local practices remain shaped by national policies, as well as by the basically non-existent public involvement in forestry matters. Key problems remain: the ongoing exploitation of most valuable forests, over-bureaucratisation, numerous issues with forest legislation, a lack of accurate information about forests, catastrophic fires and pests, a decline in forestry training and science, as well as such currently ubiquitous features of Russian society and state as the degradation of rural areas, a poor investment climate due to corruption, and a poorly functioning judicial system.

The State is Dead - Long Live the State

Overall, over the next fifty years, the current trends are likely to continue: the biological and geographic characteristics of world forests will change as a result of climate change; natural forests will continue to degrade, and a larger share of forests will be man-made and managed. The last decades have shown the low level of effectiveness of global supranational programmes, but also the weakness of market incentives for protecting forests. For future efforts to be successful, national-level institutional reforms and better national governance are needed. It is also governments who can provide accurate knowledge about forest resources and how people should use them - the basis of our vision of the future and policy-making. It is governments who should guarantee secure land tenure, and importantly pass effective and well-enforced laws. No single institution, neither domestic nor international, neither private nor public, can address the challenges facing world forests, and in the end, it has to be a global collaborative effort. Governments need to take the lead.