The Forestry Department of FAO is developing a Global Forest Survey (GFS) following its broad mandate to carry out global assessments of forests and forestry. The GFS would be part of the Forest Reources Assessment Programme and would complement the compilation and analyses of national reports and information. The current paper outlines the background and suggested approach. The GFS would be a large undertaking that would rely on FAO’s role for coordinating global information efforts, as well as funding and implementation by international organisations and governments. The GFS has a strong emphasis on FAO’s coordinating and facilitating role, inviting partners to implement the survey through independent country projects.
The background to the GFS is the gap between required and available information on forests and forestry. Despite considerable attention in international fora over the past decades, information on basic forestry parameters is still missing or of a poor quality for most countries. Systematic inventories are carried out only by a small proportion of the world’s countries. The efforts to establish forest inventories in developing countries have generally not lead to ongoing monitoring of the resources and its use, nor to a sustained capacity to carry out forest surveys.
Requirements for forest and forestry information are large and undisputable. On national level, quality information is required for policy development, implementation and monitoring. Without relevant base information, it is not possible to reliably outline optional courses, nor to evaluate the effects of previous decisions. On the international level, several processes, notably those dealing with carbon cycling and biodiversity, require quality controlled input to models and analyses as well as monitoring systems. Such information is today largely missing.
The Global Forest Survey will adress the above issues and have the objectives:
1. National capacity building for sustainable forest management;
2. Forestry knowledge management for international processes.
The GFS is justified by the clear role and mandate of FAO. Three strategies of the Forestry Department are (a) to serve as a neutral forum for policy and technical dialouge and source of global information, (b) to set clear priorities according to international demands, which currently includes information systems, global assessments and outlook studies, and (c) to build partnerships with member countries, international organizations, NGO's and the private sector to address and implement the Forestry Programme. The GFS is designed to work along these three strategies.
The GFS methodology, outlined in this paper, suggests a global field sampling, corresponding to the implementation of existing national forest inventories. The rationale behind a large scale field sampling is that data must be measured or observed in the relevant management scale to be useful for aggregated analyses. Furthermore, most variables of interest (including biological, socio-economic and institutional information) can only be collected on site. The knowledge on how to design field inventories is available since many years, and methodologies (measurements, observations, interviews) exist for assessing the broad range of forest and forestry variables relevant for national and international processes. The GFS intends to implement this knowledge on a global level.
Implementation of the GFS will be organised by country (or group of countries). The reason for using administrative boundaries are (a) to facilitate national capacity building in the implementation, (b) to be able to tie in with existing national survey grids, (c) to enable project formulation for the field component on, e.g., a bilateral basis. In addition to the country survey, a secretariat and implementation team at FAO will coordinate and facilitate the implementation. FAO will also manage the information obtained and report results.
An indicative budget for the GFS gives a total cost of 158 million US$ over a period of nine years for a first round of the survey. Of this, 37 million US$ is channeled through FAO and 121 million US$ is for implementation of country-wise surveys without direct involvement of FAO.
