Table 1.
Existing indicator systems for sustainable forest management.
| Relevant convention or process | Indicators |
|---|---|
| Global level processes seeking to measure sustainable forest management on a country scale | |
| Millennium Development Goals | Under goal 7: ‘Ensure environmental sustainability’ there is an indicator: ‘proportion of land area covered by forest’ but no reference to forest quality or sustainability of management |
| Convention on Biological Diversity | The CBD secretariat is developing indicators for its 2010 target including, ‘Area of forest…ecosystems under sustainable management’. It seeks to develop outcome oriented targets to assess the programme of work on forest biological diversity with some indicators relevant to SFM |
| International Tropical Timber Organization | ITTO has drawn up various C&I including for biodiversity conservation (Anon. 1996a), natural forest management (Anon. 1992), plantations (Anon. 1993b) and restoration (Anon. 2002a) |
| UN Forest Resources Assessment | The Forest Resource Assessment 2000 included aspects of biodiversity, naturalness and non-timber forest products (Nyyssönen & Ahti 1996) particularly in the temperate and boreal component |
| Regional level criteria and indicator processes seeking to measure forest quality on a country scale | |
| Ministerial Conference for the Protection of Forests in Europe | MCPFE has drawn up indicators of good forest management at a national level (Anon. 2002b), and used them to report on European forest status (MCPFE 2003) |
| Montreal Process | Has drawn up C&I with 10 non-European temperate and boreal countries including a definition of sustainable forest management (Canadian Council of Forest Ministers 1995) |
| Tarapoto Process | Indicators were developed by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (Anon. 1995a; but this process has not yet been reported in detail |
| Dry-Zone Africa Process | A series of C&I were agreed (Anon. 1996b), but have not been measured |
| Central American Process | Draft C&I were developed in 1997, but have yet to be fully applied |
| North Africa and the Middle East | FAO process—draft C&I were produced in 1997 |
| African Timber Organization | C&I developed with the International Tropical Timber Organisation (Anon. 2003) with plans for implementation (Anon. 2003) |
| National level criteria and indicator schemes seeking to measure forest quality on a country scale | |
| France | Detailed indicators for French forests were developed in the 1990s and are still used for reporting to the MCPFE process (Anon. 1994) |
| Finland | Criteria and indicators were developed in 1997 (Eeronheimo et al. 1997) |
| Stand and landscape-level attempts to set criteria of forest quality and biodiversity | |
| Forest Stewardship Council | An accreditation body for independent assessment of sustainable forest management. The Principles and Criteria guide certification bodies, which draw up their own standards |
| Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes | Formerly the Pan European Forest Certification scheme, previously operating just in Europe but now seeking a global programme |
| ISO 14000 | The International Organization of Standardization has developed a certification scheme for timber, although this does not use independent assessment at stand level |
| Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) | CIFOR conducted a series of field-test to develop a generic set of C&I for SFM as well as toolkits for developing, choosing and testing C&I for stand-level forest management, along with specific criteria and indicators for plantations (Poulsen et al. 2001) |
| Non-governmental attempts to define good forest management | |
| WWF/IUCN/École Polytehnique Fédérale de Lausanne | A landscape-scale system for measuring forest quality was developed and tested, based on indicators of authenticity, environmental benefits and social and economic benefits (Dudley & Rae 1998) |
| IUCN The World Conservation Union | IUCN developed a computer software approach to measuring forest well-being using variable indicators (Moiseev et al. 2002) |
| WWF European forest scorecards | The WWF European programme developed detailed scorecards for forest condition on a national scale (Sollander 2000) |
| ProForest | Indicators of High Conservation Value Forest have been developed at stand and landscape level (Jennings et al. 2003) |