Ensuring Sustainable Forest Management – Addressing the Barriers

By Guy Salmon
Ecologic Foundation
www.ecologic.org.nz

Abstract

There is widespread agreement that planted forests can play an important and multi-faceted role in sustainable development; and there is also a widely shared understanding of what sustainable forest management means. Despite these promising foundations, there remain many barriers to realizing planted forestry’s potential contribution to sustainable development. The paper identifies and discusses some of these.

There has not always been enough attention given to getting forestry’s relationships right for the long term. Corporate social responsibility has a key role to play in this.

The unbalanced governance framework of the international trading system gives a competitive advantage to cut-out-and-get-out forestry; limits the incentive for global expansion of planted forestry; and makes it difficult to establish global frameworks for sustainable management. Forest certification may offer a way out of this impasse, but is only a first step.

An advantage often claimed for the New Zealand model of plantation forestry development is that it has led to the protection of natural forests. That conclusion can only be drawn by excluding consideration of the effects of trade in forest products. The decline in wood production from New Zealand natural forests has been accompanied by a steep, sustained upsurge in imports of wooden furniture, sourced mainly from unsustainable production from tropical forests.

The modest uptake of sustainable practices in developing countries highlights the need for basic institution-building as an underpinning for planted forestry. Developing greater local democracy is the most promising way to defuse civil society opposition to planted forestry.

The advent of the Kyoto Protocol could greatly enhance the prospects for planted forestry, but it also has the potential to disadvantage some existing forest owners. Responses to this situation should acknowledge, rather than campaign against, society’s long-term interests in managing climate change.

The need for corporate social responsibility is again highlighted by the need to elicit community support and co-operation in measures to protect the biosecurity of planted forests. This is emerging as a key issue, as pests and diseases spread to southern hemisphere countries, and communities react negatively to control measures.

There is also widespread anxiety in civil society about genetically engineered crops. Nonetheless, gene technology offers important opportunities for planted forestry to enhance its contribution to sustainable development. Concerns about gene flow can and should be addressed by molecular strategies. Research into a new generation of potentially more acceptable crop products should not be deterred.

Overall, sustainable development in planted forestry will advance faster if we can focus on building mutual respect and cohesion amongst stakeholders, and a shared collective vision.

Introduction

There is widespread agreement among informed people that planted forests can play an important and wide-ranging role in sustainable development.

There is also remarkably wide agreement on what sustainable forest management involves, as reflected in the Montreal Criteria, and in the essential similarity of the principles and criteria offered by the various forest certification bodies.

Given these two facts, it is somewhat surprising that more progress has not been made in addressing the remaining barriers to the use of planted forests to promote sustainable development; and that indeed, there is still so much polarization around the subject. This paper sets out to ask why this is so, and what might be done about it. Much could be said: time allows one only to touch lightly on a few major issues.

The overview offered here is a personal one. It is not the detached view of an academic providing an overview of the literature on this topic, but rather the committed view of a practicing environmentalist who passionately believes that the managers of both planted forests and natural forests can make an important contribution to sustainable development, and that they should be encouraged and enabled to do so.

Planted forestry’s multifaceted global contribution

While wood production for national and global markets has driven much planted forest development so far, there is increasing recognition of the role that planted forests can also play in meeting local needs for wood and other forest products, in reducing pressure on natural forests, in soil conservation, and in helping to reduce the risks of global climate change.

Climate change is a relatively new area of focus in forestry. The primary thrust of climate change policy must, of course, be to reduce harmful emissions. Nonetheless planted forests can provide a manifold supporting role. The expansion of permanent planted forests can provide low-cost, reasonably secure carbon storage during the crucial and difficult transition phase to a fossil fuel-free future. The same forests, managed sustainably, can produce solid wood products to substitute for steel, concrete and other fossil fuel-intensive products, especially in the building industry. If by taking advantage of forestry opportunities we can lower the economic costs of introducing climate change policies, then it will be easier for the world to agree on more demanding targets for the next round of emissions reduction.

Planted forests can also yield the feedstock for biofuels, displacing coal and gas in many industrial situations requiring process heat, and possibly even providing a resource for environmentally-friendly liquid transport fuels. No other early substitutes for motor vehicle fuel are in sight, particularly when regard is had to the costs of replacing existing distribution infrastructure. Investment in biofuels is likely to be a key strategic ingredient if low-carbon scenarios are to be realized by mid-century.

Planted forestry depends on getting relationships right for the long term

New Zealand is widely regarded as a leading example of excellence in plantation forestry. The New Zealand case study is an interesting one. It is often presented in technical or commercial terms, but the societal context of attitudes to forestry has also been important.

The membership base of New Zealand’s NGOs would, in my assessment, largely accept the analysis of Maclaren that planted forests generally have had a positive impact on New Zealand’s environment. This favourable opinion environment has not always surrounded planted forestry in this country. Its presence today reflects to a large degree the planted forest industry’s willingness to give balanced consideration to key social and environmental issues, and to negotiate Accords with civil society organizations.

The benefits of forestry are also perceived to have been widely spread through New Zealand society. Forestry, along with fishing, has been an important part of the recent surge in economic development of New Zealand’s traditionally disadvantaged Maori community. This has been assisted by governmental attention in recent decades to delivering on the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi, through the restoration to Maori of rangatiratanga over land and resources. Maori are not just contributors to the forestry workforce: they are now also significant actual and prospective forest owners and managers.

As well, many farmers have established planted forests as part of their farms. Planted forests are recognized as making a significant contribution to local economic development in many regions of the country. There have been issues of concern at different times, but the broad spectrum of groupings that make up New Zealand society today appear at ease with plantation forestry. Even though more than 70 percent of the planted forest estate is foreign-owned, the deliberate burning of planted forests is a rarity in this country.

The take-home message from New Zealand is not just that there has been a strong focus on building a knowledge base around planted forest management, and that commercial structures have delivered substantial investments in the planted forest sector. These are obviously important parts of the New Zealand story. But the message is also that serious attention to the interests of stakeholders in social and environmental matters has created a context in which planted forestry can flourish.

Planted forestry is a long-term investment. It is tied to land, to particular places, and to particular communities. It is an investment that, more than most, needs to be nurtured and protected through a strong focus on good, long-term stakeholder relations and a ‘triple bottom line’ approach to the business. In short, successful planted forestry calls for corporate social responsibility.

In many countries, and in the eyes of the NGO community internationally, damage has been done to the reputation of planted forestry by organizations that have planted land but did not show a commitment to corporate social responsibility. Many planting projects have failed. Often, local people have resented the projects and set fire to the trees. Elsewhere, the objective of using land for planted forestry has spurred the removal of natural forest – and continues to do so.

All these things contribute to the widespread global perception that something is wrong with plantation forestry. But things are changing. When planted forestry is commonly thought of as naturally involving social responsibility, an important barrier to its advancement will have been removed.

Sustainable forestry needs a sustainable trading system

If the first barrier to achieving widely accepted, sustainable, planted forestry has been a lack of social responsibility amongst some of its practitioners, a second barrier – yet to be tackled – lies in the fact that the international trading system does not support (indeed more commonly functions to undermine) the exercise of sustainable practices and corporate social responsibility. This affects all of us, but most especially the people of developing countries.

In the polarized debate about globalisation, it is worth bearing in mind that the potential for any widely acceptable political resolution centres around seeking a more balanced governance of global trade and investment. The rules governing the international trading system are unbalanced at present. They establish a framework for ensuring the cheapest product gains market share, but there is almost no framework at all, to ensure that products entering international trade are sustainably produced. Nor does the trading system require that traded product prices reflect the real environmental costs involved in their production. It is not necessary to adopt the simplistic view of an anti-globalisation protester to see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the global trading system works at present.

In forestry, it is the cut-out-and-get-out, unsustainable forest producer who gains the competitive advantage in the global marketplace. Sustainable wood producers, including planted forestry, may find support in domestic markets but they are left with only a residual share of the international wood trade. Wealthy countries may talk about promoting sustainable development, but they still insist on importing and using the cheapest available wood.

International trade is the mechanism through which much of a wealthy country’s environmental footprint is imposed beyond its own borders. The globalisation of economic activity puts pressure on natural resources wherever environmental controls are weak. The world’s tropical rainforests, many wildlife species – whose body parts are in demand for Asian medicines – and the once-clean streams and rivers flowing through New Zealand’s export dairying regions, are all examples of natural resources that are suffering greatly as a result.

The core problem here is the weakness of environmental controls in many countries, not trade itself. Nonetheless, trade can magnify the problem in two ways. First, trade opportunities provide the incentive for a much higher level of production in many countries, and associated environmental damage, than would occur in the absence of trade. Second, the competitiveness dynamic, heightened by international trade, stimulates businesses interests to lobby against effective environmental laws and policies, or to corrupt whatever laws and policies do exist.

International businesses have swept through the forests of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, removing most of the marketable assets for export and private profit. On many islands, nothing has been left for local people or future generations beyond a crumbling, concrete log pad. In these countries, the power of business interests over natural resources policy has made a nonsense of national sovereignty. Per capita economic wealth is less today than it was when the log boom began, and in the meantime, the forests have been degraded and most of the marketable wood has gone.

In short, the competitiveness dynamic fueled by international trade often undermines the capacity of a community, or a whole country, to move its productive activities on to a sustainable basis. At the global level, it also creates a very substantial barrier to the negotiation and implementation of international agreements to sustain and protect the environment, such as the Kyoto Protocol, or the ill-fated Forests Convention.

In wood production, as in most economic activities, sustainable practices come at a cost. It is generally cheaper and quicker to rip down a natural forest than to manage it sustainably, or to grow a planted forest. For such reasons, sustainably produced products tend to have higher production costs than unsustainably produced ones. The fact that they are thereby rendered uncompetitive in most places is a fundamental barrier to the expansion of planted forestry.

Even in countries like New Zealand and Chile which have become extremely low-cost producers of planted wood, the returns to the forest grower are effectively capped by the cost of pulling cheap wood out of the ransacked natural forests of Indonesia and Siberia. The incentive for global expansion of planted forests is limited accordingly.

In addressing this barrier, rooted in the global trading system, there appear to be three possible ways forward:

A renewed effort to achieve a more balanced governance framework for the global trading system, including agreed standards for sustainable forestry;
A precedent-setting initiative by one or more countries to limit wood imports to sustainably produced products, in effect testing the application of the WTO appellate body ruling in the shrimp turtle case, which suggests that GATT Article 20 can justify such action;
Continued development and application of a non-governmental system of standards and certification for well-managed forests.

In recent times, attention has focused on the third approach, not least because if it is successful, it will make the other two approaches more workable and easier to progress. (Indeed, in the long run, that may be its major significance.) Forest management certification has both pioneered and benefited from, a global surge of interest in a wide range of voluntary standards, certification systems and labels focused on sustainable development objectives. It is important to recognize that this trend is no longer driven primarily by the minority preferences of environmentally-aware consumers, but rather by a broader demand for corporate social responsibility, and therefore has become a much bigger phenomenon than it was before.

The rapid expansion of the certification of well-managed forests has however, put the spotlight on institutional constraints on sustainable forestry practice, constraints that are even more fundamental than those provided by the global trading system. While FSC certificates have been issued over more than 31 million hectares of forest in 56 countries, most of the certified area is in Europe, North America and other parts of the developed world. Only a tiny percentage comprises natural forests of developing countries and of Russia – the places where unsustainable forest practices first gave rise to the demands for global standards and certification. In many of these countries, the barriers to sustainable forest management, including planted forestry investment, appear to be more fundamental, and relate to the need for development of basic institutions.

Trade and the New Zealand model

The rules governing the global trading system remain fundamental to the future management prospects of natural forests, regardless of the level of commitment that may exist to establishing planted forests. This is well illustrated by the ‘the New Zealand model,’ which has been a strong focus for the present meeting. Under ‘the New Zealand model’ planted forests are misleadingly said to have led to the protection of natural forests. Such a conclusion can only be drawn if international trade in forest products is left out of the picture.

Figure 1 shows trends in natural timber production in New Zealand, and in imports of tropical sawn timber and wooden furniture into the country from abroad. It is not possible to compare these trends on a volume basis because of a lack of data: the furniture import figures are available only in terms of dollar value. Nonetheless the graph illustrates clearly that as New Zealand’s natural forest harvest of sawn timber declined during the 1990s, it was accompanied by an upsurge in wooden furniture imports. Such imports had long fluctuated but never previously exceeded NZ $40 million. Yet over seven years from 1995 to 2002 they rocketed to NZ $111 million, while New Zealand’s natural forest production declined from 85,000 to 28,000 cubic metres, and political announcements indicated it would drop further. More than 60 percent of this substantial volume of imported wooden furniture was sourced from Asian countries, and virtually none of it was certified as well-managed.

A more accurate interpretation of the effect of ‘the New Zealand model’ on natural forests is as follows. First, because of a narrow focus on planting radiata pine and Douglas fir, the nation’s planted forests have not been able to meet New Zealanders’ demand for varied, furniture grade woods. Second, as production of these specialty woods from New Zealand’s own natural forests was curbed by political decisions and fell below a certain level, there was a strong growth of wooden furniture imports, mainly from tropical countries. The net result is that New Zealand’s demand for specialty furniture woods, which once fell on New Zealand’s own natural forests, in which strict sustainable management practices had recently been introduced, has now been shifted offshore to mainly tropical forests where the wood is being sourced by unsustainable methods.

The establishment of planted forests creates an opportunity for pressure on natural forests to be reduced. But other important and more difficult steps have to be taken as well, if there is to be any real benefit for natural forests.

Getting institutions right for planted forestry

As a long term investment, planted forestry is particularly dependent on the existence of a settled and generally accepted societal framework for ensuring that those who invest in plantings are able to secure for themselves the benefits of their actions. This includes rights of tenure of land and tree crops; secure access to manage, transport and market crops; availability of funds for rural investments; and a properly functioning legal and judicial system that enables the making and enforcing of durable contracts.

Forestry also depends on the development and transfer of knowledge and technology, which in turn depends on institutions with capability to identify and propagate appropriate growing stock and to disseminate know-how to would-be forest investors. The question of scale is important. In developing countries, planted forestry will often best establish itself through the actions of small growers. A system of knowledge and technology outreach that meets the needs of the small grower is crucial.

The broad institutional context is often taken for granted in relatively developed countries, but it is a limiting pre-requisite in many developing countries. Developed countries can assist in building the necessary institutions in developing countries, but in this area particularly, technical assistance faces real limits in making a difference if there is not consistent political backing for good policies.

The absence of effective democratic institutions, especially at the local level, is increasingly showing itself to be a barrier in many developing countries. There are many examples where civil society, excluded from a meaningful role in decision-making over major land use change, organizes itself in opposition to planted forestry.

The opposition of civil society movements around the world is not so much to the principle of planted forests, as to the development of large commercial plantations. There have of course been many unfortunate examples of poor planted forestry projects. Planted forests do indeed deserve to be opposed in those cases where they are poorly sited or managed so that they fail to enhance the environment, or fail to benefit the local people. But while it is right to oppose bad commercial plantations, it is surely wrong and unfortunate when NGOs adopt the stance of opposing all commercial plantations. This appears to be a failure to think globally before acting locally.

To ensure that commercial plantations are good plantations, it is important to have democratic procedures and institutions at the local level. Promoting such a democratic framework for forestry decision-making is the real civil society issue – not the simplistic idea that natural forests are good, commercial plantations are bad.

To address this barrier to planted forestry, efforts should be directed to ensuring that three democratic requirements are operative in every country. First, there should be an environmental impact assessment process, that enables local communities to understand the implications of a planted forest or other development proposal. Second, there should be a democratic process through which communities can establish binding rules for the protection of land, soil, water, biodiversity and other valued resources and amenities. This would provide the framework within which any forestry developments would be judged, and must operate. Third there should be a process for ensuring that communities can obtain enforcement of these rules, against large multinational companies or indeed any one else.

Where groups oppose planted forests or promote barriers to trade in forest products, it is largely because no such democratic procedures are available, or they have no faith that those that are available will work. Everyone in the forest sector ought to be concerned at the implications of this situation for the future well-being of forestry. The UNFF process ought to consider ways, including international agreement, that could help to remedy this deficiency.

Responding to the Kyoto Protocol

The advent of the Kyoto Protocol is extremely important since, if it enters into force, it will place a value (albeit a misleadingly low value at this stage) on the carbon-storage function of new planted forests. This seems likely to have a major impact on the growth of planted forestry, and the contribution it makes to sustainable development.

The Protocol has placed considerable strain on corporate social responsibility by forestry and forest products companies. While everyone supports in theory the idea that forests have multiple values for society, there have always been difficulties in practice when the value that society places on forest values other than wood adversely affects the forest owner. Many corporate forestry companies oppose the Kyoto Protocol for this reason. They have a number of concerns, for example:

The Protocol will increase the cost of processing wood, especially for players heavily committed to markets for paper and reconstituted wood products;
Where no compensatory national policies exist, the Protocol will tilt the playing field in favour of wood growing and wood processing competitors based in developing countries and non-ratifying countries;
The Protocol will generally stimulate planted forestry, arguably leading to a global oversupply of wood, and will thereby depress the commercial value of the marketable wood in existing planted forests.

Against this, it should be noted that the Protocol:

provides ample scope for governments to shelter their forestry and wood processing industries should they see value in doing so;
creates new opportunities for those with expertise in growing and managing planted forests;
is likely to improve the ability of solid wood products to compete with fossil-fuel intensive competitors such as cement, steel and aluminium.

Corporate forestry companies like to claim that wood is a more environmentally friendly product than those competing materials. At the same time, the companies have spent the last decade or more, opposing the development of international agreements to address the threat of climate change. They cannot have it both ways. The claim that wood is an environmentally friendlier material rests virtually entirely on the much lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with its production compared to the emissions associated with steel, aluminium and cement manufacture.

Corporate forestry companies are not strangers to the problems of operating as price takers in wood markets. While the Kyoto Protocol may stimulate some new planting in developing countries, the companies themselves have long operated against a backdrop of an overhang of cheap wood from natural forests. In devising ongoing strategies to protect their interests, they will have to take care to maintain the support and confidence of societies that are increasingly strongly committed to addressing global climate change. In the long run it is not tenable for such companies to campaign politically against the perceived interests of the societies in which they operate.

Society has collective environmental and social interests, as well as economic ones, to promote in governance arrangements at the global level. This recognition must be our starting for developing policy approaches to ensure that planted forestry contributes to sustainable development, globally, nationally and locally.

Biosecurity issues and planted forestry

Biosecurity issues provide a clear message about the importance of fostering corporate social responsibility in the planted forestry business. Pathologists are warning that, despite intensive efforts to keep diseases out, new and seriously damaging incursions of diseases in planted forests are occurring in all countries of the Southern Hemisphere with increasing frequency. These incursions can only be combated with the support and forbearance of local communities.

Here in New Zealand, suburbs of Auckland have been subjected to aerial spraying campaigns to stamp out incursions of alien organisms that threaten forests twice in the last five years. Similar operations are bound to be needed in future. The spraying operations appear to generate health effects, including some unpleasant allergic effects, in a minority of people. There is considerable inconvenience for those who have to be moved out of the target area. Public support for these operations is eroding and, in my experience, those concerned about the spraying are increasingly antagonistic toward what they see as vested interests driving the spraying programme.

This is a serious matter since, if a spraying programme is halted through public opposition, it will almost certainly not be possible to start another in the future. This has ominous implications not just for planted forests but also for our ability to protect New Zealand’s natural forests from biosecurity threats.

A very similar issue arises in pest control within forests. In New Zealand, the chemical 1080 has become an essential tool for the control of the introduced Australian possum, a serious pest of both planted and natural forests. Yet despite precautions, 1080 use can have damaging effects on non-target species such as deer, farm livestock and farm dogs. There is widespread community opposition within New Zealand to the use of 1080, but no alternative is in sight.

The issue is another which highlights the importance of forestry companies recognizing the need for good long term relationships with the community, and therefore demonstrating corporate social responsibility. Unless a greater sense of identity can be forged between the forest industries and the people of New Zealand, it is difficult to see that New Zealanders will be willing to continue making perceived sacrifices to ensure the biosecurity of planted forests owned mainly by foreign corporate businesses. Similar issues are likely to arise in other planted forest countries.

Genetic engineering and planted forestry

Genetic modification of trees offers potential for lowering growing costs, for re-afforesting lands degraded by agriculture, including salt-damaged soils, for improving disease resistance, and for modifying wood properties to better meet end user needs. In the context of the contribution which planted forestry might make to sustainable development, these are significant potentials, which deserve to be carefully examined.

From a sustainability point of view, the major disadvantage of the current generation of genetically modified crops is the lack of control they afford over the undesired flow of modified genes to other organisms. The use of strategies such as crop timing and buffer zones to limit gene flow has a number of difficulties, especially when modified crops are grown on a large scale; and such approaches are not winning public acceptance.

At least ten molecular strategies for containment of gene flow have also been described, including sterility, self-fertilisation without opening of the flower, and induced incompatibility. Development of some of these strategies is more advanced than others. No single strategy is considered likely to be suitable for all crops but a combination of them offers promise for achieving effective transgene containment. There is also an emerging ability to excise selectable marker genes. An editorial in Nature Biotechnology, the leading scientific publication in this field, says: "It is time that industry took decisive steps to address gene flow from their products. Environmental concerns surrounding GM crops are not going to go away."

It is understandable that there is substantial civil society rejection of the current generation of transgenic crops. But this reality should not deter further research into a new generation of environmentally more acceptable products, products which could greatly enhance the contribution planted forestry can make to sustainable development.

A concluding personal reflection

In a visit to Helsinki last December I interviewed politicians from the six very different political parties that make up the Environment Committee of the Finnish Parliament. It was striking that, of 47 legislative and policy measures placed before this Committee during last year, the Committee was able to provide an unanimous report on 46; and that the Committee’s report was subsequently adopted by the Finnish Parliament in each case.

Many of the matters reported on by the Committee were potentially contentious, including action to curb nutrient discharges from agriculture; an action plan for protection of biodiversity on private land; and ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The only matter on which the Committee was unable to reach unanimity was the construction of a fifth nuclear power plant in Finland.

It was clear to me that the Environment Committee contains people of widely different values, people who nonetheless practice mutual respect and work hard to achieve mutually agreed courses of action. Finland shares with some other Nordic countries a famous capacity for social cohesion, and an ability to identify and pursue collective interests. These Nordic habits are, I believe, capable of being learned, practiced and valued by people of other cultural backgrounds, and particularly by their leaders.

Sustainable development is not just about technical capacities, policies and institution-building. It is also about learning the political and leadership skills that are needed to implement this larger, more inclusive vision of development.

The planted forest sector seems, as I said at the outset, to be well-placed to work together on removing the remaining barriers that obstruct its growth and potential contribution. Yet the sector has remained more polarized and has achieved less than it might have done. The answer may lie in part, in giving greater attention to those Nordic strengths: the tireless cultivation of the habits of social cohesion, and of building shared collective vision. In that respect, our present meeting is a welcome step on the way.

Contact for Enquiries

MAF Information Services
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND

Fax: +64 4 894 0721
Contact this person