Many countries have elaborated national policies or special programmes for the conservation of biological diversity, including forest biological diversity and forest genetic resources. Growing attention to conservation reflects increasing concern about alterations in forests and the long-term maintenance of the health and overall productivity of forests and forest ecosystems.
The preamble of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), adopted in 1992, affirms that States have sovereign rights over their biological resources, and that they are responsible for conserving their biological diversity and for using their biological resources in a sustainable manner (see brief profile on the CBD in Annex 2). The CBD relates to ecological, social, economic and ethical values of diversity.
National policies and programmes related to forest genetic resources cover a wide range of activities, from conservation measures to protect rare and endangered species and populations and regulations governing seed collection and transfer in socio-economically important tree species, to comprehensive approaches to the management of landscapes, ecosystems and forest genetic resources. With these complexities in mind, considerations related to forest genetic resources have been integrated in a number of countries within wider frameworks, such as national forest programmes and biodiversity action plans.
The management of an appropriate combination of genetic resources areas in various locations, under diverse environmental and silvicultural conditions is the most efficient way to conserve various levels of genetic variation. However, the variety of types of field repository of genetic resources (including nature reserves and other protected areas; private and publicly owned, managed and unmanaged, natural forests and plantations; trees outside forests managed in agroforestry systems and growing on homesteads and along rivers and roads; arboreta and botanic gardens; and field trials and live collections established within the framework of selection and tree improvement programmes), and the need to ensure complementarity among them, constitute a major organizational, institutional and technical challenge (see Figure 1).
Countries increasingly acknowledge the cross-sectoral nature of conservation and the importance of integrated strategic approaches to the implementation of related activities, and this is reflected also in programmes at the international level (see e.g. FAO 1999a; Ouédraogo 1997, Palmberg-Lerche 1997, Yanchuk and Lester 1996).
National programmes provide the basic framework for action in the management of forest genetic resources, but at the same time they have a number of limitations. The natural distribution of many forest tree species crosses political borders. Furthermore, some tree species, populations and provenances have little current importance in their countries of origin, while they have become socially or economically important outside their natural ranges. Such situations raise questions regarding responsibilities in conservation, especially in in situ conservation. Furthermore, a number of introductions, frequently of undocumented origin, have evolved into landraces which are well adapted to environmental conditions in the species’ new habitat. These landraces are often important in genetic conservation activities, and collaboration between two or more countries is therefore called for to ensure complementarity of in situ and ex situ activities.
