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How do you Measure Sustainable Forest Management?
Since the Rio Earth Summit, several national and international initiatives have been launched to improve our understanding of and measure progress towards SFM. The most comprehensive and far reaching of these are the initiatives on C&I for SFM, which now involve more than 100 countries. The Montreal Process is one of these initiatives and involves 12 countries, including Australia.
C&I characterise the essential components of SFM, and provide a framework for answering the fundamental question, how well are we managing our forests? They recognise forests as ecosystems that provide a wide, complex and dynamic array of environmental and socio-economic benefits and services. Used to monitor and assess trends in forest conditions and management, C&I provide information essential to the formulation of policies that promote SFM.
Criteria describe the broad forest values that society seeks to maintain.
The seven criteria identified by the Montreal Process are the essential components of the sustainable management of forests. They include vital functions and attributes (biodiversity, productivity, forest health, carbon sequestration, and soil and water protection), socio-economic benefits (timber, recreation and cultural values), and the laws and regulations that constitute the forest policy framework.
Indicators provide measures of change in these criteria over time. They are ways to assess or describe criteria and may be quantitative or qualitative. All indicators provide information about forest conditions and management and, over time, identify the direction of changes.
In Australia, there is agreement that the seven Montreal Process criteria address all the forest values that the broader community seeks to maintain. However, every forest region of Australia is different, so the application and importance of the criteria and their respective indicators will vary between tenures and broad forest types.
In recognition of these regional differences, Australia has developed its own framework of regional indicators for assessing the sustainability of forest management. The Commonwealth-State Montreal Process Implementation Group for Australia has developed the framework with input from stakeholders.
Using the agreed Montreal Process national criteria as a starting point, Australia's framework of C&I of SFM sets out what we consider are the most relevant indicators for use at the regional level at this point in time. An important aspect of the framework is that it is intended to promote consistency in reporting at all levels and to avoid duplication in data collection.