The Global Forest Survey should be regarded as a component of and development of FAO’s global forest resources assessments, for which FAO has received a strong mandate from its member countries.
The over-arching mission for the Forestry Department of FAO is "to enhance human well-being through support to member countries in the sustainable management of the world's trees and forests" (FAO 2000). The three specified goals are, in short (a) to maximize benefits from the forest for sustainable development, (b) the conservation, sustainable management and improved utilization of trees and forest systems, and (c) increased access to reliable and timely forestry information. The Global Forest Survey addresses the latter goal directly and facilitates the first two.
The FAO Forestry Strategy (FAO 2000) further outlines three strategies. First to serve as a neutral forum for policy and technical dialouge and source of global information. Secondly to set clear priorities according to international demands, which currently includes information systems, global assessments and outlook studies. Thirdly to build partnerships with member countries, international organizations, NGO's and the private sector to address and implement the Forestry Programme. The Global Forestry Survey is designed to work along these three strategies.
The FAO corporate communication policy and strategy (FAO 1999a) state that "communication lies at the core of FAO's mandate" referring to the first Article of the FAO constitution that FAO "shall collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information...". The policy also clearly outlines a future with stronger partnerships and collaboration in addressing the world's needs for accurate, comprehensive and recent information. The Global Forest Survey intends to build a framework where member countries and other partners have the main implementation role and where FAO acts as coordinator and facilitator.
The current gaps in forest and forestry information, as indicated above, should be addressed to improve national assessment, monitoring and policy development, and to improve the development and implementation of international policies. This includes the development of definitions and information standards. The GFS would in itself adress the information needs for global and regional forestry scenarios, evaluation of forest management options with respect to environmental as well as economic goals, and the development and monitoring of international policies and processes. The GFS would indirectly address national information requirements by building capacity and providing a framework for national forest inventories.
FAO has the responsibility to develop and improve approaches which will provide the best quality forest resources information for the global assessments. Information needs are wide in scope and require current and accurate information to serve its member countries and the various international processes, such as those relating to Sustainable Forest Management, Climate Change (carbon cycling), Sustainable Development, Biological Diversity and others. However, the country results for FRA 2000, now almost complete, demonstrate the need for a strategic mechanism to ensure the generation of an improved set of forest resources information over that currently available.
The analysis above of the inventories from developing countries that were used for FRA 2000 shows that only a handful provide the full range of information needed for the assessment, are current, and employ continous forest inventory techniques (CFI). Another seventy-five percent of the inventories have limited information and were mostly the result of forest mapping exercises (without ground sampling) and the remaining twenty-percent had information that was severely outdated or subjective. Comparability between all of the inventories is also low, which necessitated ”adjustments” to compensate for differences in classifications and definitions to a global standard. In addition, various international organisation’s have attempted to fill the apparent gaps in national quality information, often using methods or assumptions that are not quality controlled, nor endorsed by the concerned countries. As a result, there is a risk that international processes must deal with a less than optimal set of information required for key decision making.
Capacity building for forest resources assessment has been an objective in FAO's global assessments for several decades. The approaches have been involvement of national correspondents in the assessments, national or regional workshops and various trainings or scholarships for forestry professionals. It appears that the effect of these efforts has been low.
Obviously, the national capacity to collect, organise and analyse forestry information has not significantly improved over the past decades – despite considerable efforts by FAO and many other organisations. Besides the fact that many countries still lack the skills and resources to carry out the inventories on a sustainable basis, there is also a lack of a strong technical framework which could serve to set standards and provide guidance to those countries that do have the skills and resources. A new approach for addressing capacity needs is sought for.
The Global Forest Survey would provide a means to address these concerns by a) providing a common technical framework for countries upon which they could base their own inventories, b) a mechanism to activate international, donor and bi-lateral support to countries for the execution of inventories, c) a country-capacity building programme that would train professionals in developing countries, and d) a high-profile FAO global exercise that would engage decision makers through formal means by providing them the information that is required by the many international processes relating to forests.
The non-distinct boundary between forest and other lands, as well as between forestry and other land uses, calls for an approach where all land is surveyed as to forest and tree resources and their utilization. The knowledge to develop and implement such complex multi-phase surveys exists since many years within the forestry sector. It is well justified to use this existing knowledge instead of a continued reliance on various remote sensing and mapping technologies that do not have the potential to provide the qualitative information required.
