The Council on Foreign Relations

Dr. David G. Victor

Robert W. Johnson, Jr., Fellow for Science & Technology

Email: dgvictor@cfr.org

The Council on Foreign Relations is leading a small multidisciplinary research project to identify the technical potential for protecting forests around the world over the next half century. The project will also identify how the technical potentials can be codified into international agreements and institutions. Our intention is to supply ideas for forest protection that are technically, politically and legally coherent—so that future efforts to protect forests will more likely yield good results. The activity will include an initial meeting in the summer of 1999 of about a dozen experts—foresters, ecologists, biologists, economists, and others. That meeting would explore and develop the project concept. The Council will also commission pilot studies, to be presented at a second meeting in early 2000, that will allow testing of the concept and refinement of the project vision. If the concept proves to be viable, a separately funded project to provide a comprehensive analysis of the technical potential for forest protection would likely continue thereafter for about two years.

The problem of Earth’s dwindling natural forests is now regularly on the international agenda. In the last decade the world community has adopted non-binding "forest principles," established UN commissions, held numerous meetings on forest problems, and attempted to negotiate a legally binding "forest convention." Despite bold ambitions, these efforts have largely failed to increase the protection of forest lands. In part, the stalemate owes to the lack of a viable technical vision for the level of protection that can be achieved and the best ways to achieve it. Other international agreements could also affect forest practices—for example, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming could lead to protection and expansion of forests because trees and forest soils absorb carbon. But the Kyoto Protocol is also riddled with technical flaws—especially in how it accounts for forest carbon—and thus has led to deadlock.

According to a recent FAO analysis, 880 million hectares of the global closed forest area of 3.2 billion hectares has been logged; a further 670 million hectares are classified as economically accessible for logging. The remaining forest (about half) is alleged to be economically inaccessible at present. However, protected forests still comprise less than 8 per cent of the world’s forested area. In many parts of the world forests are threatened by a combination of non sustainable logging, agricultural encroachment, mining, oil exploration and other threats.

The forest industry is at a crossroads, and the route taken will determine the character and extent of forests over the next century. Current practice mixes selective logging in pristine old growth forests and managed forests such as secondary forests and plantations. Demand for forest products—mainly finished wood for construction and pulp for paper—is growing, rapidly in developing countries and more slowly in developed societies. If current extensive harvesting methods and levels of forest productivity prevail, by 2050 foresters will need to harvest at least half of the world’s forests to meet likely world industrial wood demand. In addition, less forest land will remain for nature if large tracts of forest land are converted to crops to feed the world population.

Our goal is to explore the technical and political implications and feasibility of a radically different path that would be more protective of nature. That path would require foresters to shift further from old growth to more intensively managed secondary forest and plantations. Experience shows that highly productive fast growing plantations can sustainably produce up to 20 times or more the volume of commercial cellulose fiber than natural forests. That is, foresters could raise the productivity of natural forests (about 1 cubic meter of commercially utilizable wood per hectare per year) to a technical potential of perhaps 20 cubic meters per hectare per year. Concurrently, farmers could leave more land for nature by lifting yields on present cropland rather than converting additional forests to crops. Together, some experts have suggested, these actions could shrink the area of commercially managed forests to less than one-quarter of the world forests by the year 2050, thereby allowing preservation of a much larger area of forest for environmental benefits such as preservation of biodiversity, carbon sequestration and protection of water catchments. Forests also play important roles in meeting the essential subsistence needs of local communities.

These numbers are rough calculations based on limited data, especially data from the southern United States and countries such as New Zealand, Chile and Brazil. But they indicate the huge potential for concentrating forest production and protecting the rest of forest lands for nature and recreational purposes. Our project would systematically investigate the potential in each major forest region—the U.S., Canada, Northern Europe, Russia and the main tropical regions. As well as the technical analysis we will examine the social, institutional and political obstacles. Doing so could make it possible to identify the conditions that must be satisfied for the world to follow this alternative and more protective path. We will test the hypothesis that a combination of trends in industry and society may eventually make it possible to concentrate commercial scale production forestry in a much smaller area of forest. By 2050, commercial forestry could be limited to an area possibly as low as 20 per cent of the global area of closed forest.

Exploring this issue requires a multidisciplinary analysis because the range of factors that must be considered is wide. They include: changes in the productivity of managed secondary forests and plantations; end use efficiency of forest products; availability of wood and fiber from non-forest sources; changes in income; reduced dependency on forest lands for meeting subsistence needs; rural /urban population migration; and the likely increased demand that forests be preserved primarily for environmental, subsistence, and recreational needs.

A multidisciplinary approach is needed because the range of factors that must be considered is wide. Particular attention is needed to the environmental tradeoffs associated with intensification of forest management, which is already apparent in the industry. For example plantation forests growing on some 100 million hectares (less than 3 per cent of the global forest area) already supply 20 per cent of industrial wood needs. This is forecast to increase to over 40 per cent by 2030.

However, opponents of this intensification model are concerned on several fronts. First, they argue that this intensification model will restrict possibilities for many of the rural poor to benefit from timber harvesting and may limit access to essential non timber products in areas designated for intensive production. Second, it has been argued with justification that plantation forests in some parts of the world have displaced local communities. Third there are concerns about monocultures, narrowing of biodiversity and the sustainability of plantation forests. Fourth worries about plantation forestry include the fear that globalization of the forest industry will strengthen the ability of powerful vested interests to dominate national forest policies. Fifth, there are concerns that confining logging to a smaller area will reduce the economic value of natural forests and thus make them more vulnerable to conversion to other uses. Addressing these concerns requires a proper analysis of the socioeconomic and environmental tradeoffs between different management options.

The exploratory project and subsequent studies could help policymakers accelerate and strengthen trends now glimpsed. Competitive foresters are already shifting to more sustainable reduced impact logging of secondary forest and to plantation forestry, and in many parts of the world productivity is rising. And in recent years the area of cropland has remained level even though food production has risen. These trends promisingly suggest that forest protection policy must reinforce, rather than reverse, what many societies and firms are beginning to do. However, such trends are not found everywhere, nor are they certain to persist until 2050. Extending the new vision of world forestry will require new thinking in policy for public interest groups and many governments—away from promoting selective logging on existing (often old growth) forests and toward conservation and intensive forest management.

Complementary policies, such as certification and inspection systems for plantations, will be needed to accompany this shift toward intensively harvested forests. Some such policies exist already—for example, the sustainable use certification system of the Forest Stewardship Council—and many timber companies already apply them. But these existing programs are only a recent phenomenon (most are only a few years old) and not suitable for all markets and situations. More vigorous systems with widespread application will be needed if a higher proportion of forest products is to be derived from more intensively managed secondary forests and plantations. The project would explore these international institutional dimensions of a new technical vision of world forestry.

Finally, the project would give careful attention to how forest protection would relate to other international objectives and institutions. For example, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) includes an initiative to protect forest biodiversity and also to protect intellectual property rights on products derived from nature, such as drugs that are prospected from forests. The Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol are important because they may give incentives to increase storage of carbon in forests. Also relevant are regional agreements such as the "Helsinki" and "Montreal" accords.

In November this year trade ministers are expected to announce a new agenda for liberalizing trade in forest products under the aegis of the World Trade Organization (WTO). These numerous international accords should be based on a solid underpinning for forest conservation and for encouraging responsible corporate behavior. So far that has not been the case, although some progress is being made towards adoption of best practices and development of indicators of satisfactory sustainable forest management. Our study must take account of these other activities if it is to yield specific ideas for policy that are legally and politically viable. For example, schemes that certify wood produced from plantations could run afoul of WTO’s prohibition against rules that require particular production methods—traditionally, international trade law has held that countries are free to determine how they produce products.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is managing this exploratory project; David G. Victor serves as the CFR’s project leader. Importantly, CFR is working collaboratively with the World Bank and its Alliance with the World Wide Fund for Nature on forest protection. The Alliance has set ambitious targets for the year 2005. First, to add 50 million hectares of newly "Protected Areas." Second to bring a similar area of "paper parks"—forests that are protected by law but not in practice—under effective management. Third, to bring 200 million hectares of independently certified "production forests" under sustainable management. The Alliance is in the early stages of an effort to determine whether and how the world could meet such targets. The proposed research project will be important in providing a long-term framework for the work of Alliance. CFR is also in contact with numerous other forest research, industry and advocacy organizations. FAO’s recent Global Fibre Supply and Forest Product Demand Projections provide a most useful starting point for many aspects of the proposed research and the possibility of collaborating with FAO is being explored.

This "test of concept" activity will consist of two meetings and related background research on the concept. The first meeting will be held in early summer, 1999, and attended by about one-dozen experts on forests drawn from the major relevant disciplines, such as biology, ecology, economics, international relations. Individuals will be chosen so that they represent not only current expertise but also major organizations that should be engaged in the effort. The purpose is to examine the premise that a project is needed to test the hypothesis that large tracts of forest lands can be spared for natural and recreational purposes by shifting forestry to higher productivity secondary forests and/or plantations. We will hear presentations on existing research in this area as well as on complementary issues, such as the development of forest certification systems and international legal aspects of the forest issue.

A second meeting, held about six months later, will include presentation of several background papers. Those presentations will demonstrate whether it is feasible to make robust assessments of the technical potential in different regions; at least one presentation will examine institutional and legal issues related to international forest protection. These commissioned studies will be based on available research but would offer a first test of the concept envisioned for the project.

The two meetings and background research will develop and test the concept. If it proves to be viable, a large-scale project will emerge; for that we will seek funding elsewhere. Discussions with key experts and organizations already indicate that the concept is viable and the project is extremely important; thus it is likely that funding proposals for a fuller project will be developed in the fall of 1999 and circulated prior to the second "test of concept" meeting.

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