Global forestry problems such as
deforestation, degradation, and biodiversity loss have persisted for decades. More recently, new challenges have been identified, such as atmospheric
carbon capture and storage in forests and the role they fulfill in global
climate change mitigation efforts. Various public, private, and nongovernmental
efforts have been developed and implemented to address these problems and many
new international, regional, local, and private forest institutions have been
developed in the last decade in order to improve forest conditions and
retention. Tenure arrangements and reform have been identified as crucial
components among the many new policies and institutions introduced for
improving sustainable forest management.
In this paper, in order to empirically assess the effects of forest tenure on
sustainable forest management, the authors analyzed aggregate FAO data for
selected countries in the world, supplemented by the results of numerous
country and case studies.
First, they
analyzed basic forest ownership data for major world regions and their most
forested countries. Second, they examined data about the status, management,
and environmental conditions of forest resources and their correlations with
forest tenure and sustainable forest management. Last, they examined the
influence of population, economic variables, property rights scores, and
freedom from corruption on sustainable forest management. Besides, the authors also
estimated Pearson correlation statistics among many of the key variables.
The results showed
the institutional design principles suggested by Ostrom were well accepted for
applications to public, communal, and private lands. Whatever form a forest
management institution takes (public, private, communal), to be effective it
must have clear and legitimate rules regarding who has access and use rights to
forests; monitoring and enforcement mechanisms with sufficient resources; and
sanctions for rule breaking. The analyses of countries as a whole suggest that
problems of forest land loss and sustainable forest management are related to
the amount of public land and the difference between developed and developing
countries. Larger areas of public land appear to be hard to maintain in
forests, either through mere logistical problems or due to outright governance
and tenure problems. Developed countries have largely achieved a stable level
of land use and resource extraction after centuries of exploitation of forests
and natural resources, while developing countries are still
proceeding along the Kuznet’s curve, and exploiting and deforesting in order to
achieve higher levels of economic well being.
Article by Jacek P. Siry, et al, from USA
and Puerto Rico.
Full access: https://bit.ly/2GI2tfv
Image by CIFOR, from Flickr-cc.
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