Forests provide multiple products and services, with a potential to contribute to employment and income generation. It is important for countries to increase the value and sustainable use of forest goods and services in harmony with national resource conservation and environmental protection goals. This requires the use of environmentally sound harvesting, engineering and processing methods and appropriate trade and marketing strategies.
Reduced impact logging is becoming a more and more widespread harvesting approach to trees in the tropical world, and there is a critical need to conduct a careful assessment of its impact. In addition, the costs of each logging phase and the costs for road construction or other development are not well documented or modelled to be applied to general conditions.
For these reasons governments are now imposing stricter regulations on forest harvesting and wood markets, and are requiring responsible harvesting practices as can be seen, for example, in the growth of demand for certified wood products. Given the political and market call for change, there is a commensurate desire to further articulate the nature of reduced impact logging (RIL). Some important questions must be addressed, such as: What have harvesting studies, so far carried out, been telling us and, perhaps even more important, what have these studies not told us? What should researchers do to continue promoting or not promoting reduced impact logging? Finally, does RIL cost or does it pay?
To address all these questions, the present Working Paper No. 8 of the Forest Products Division has been prepared, based on a review of a total of 266 articles dealing with logging intensities; logging cycles and waste; and residual stand and site damage. The initial review of 212 different articles on logging was conducted in 1997 for the FAO Global Fibre Supply Model (Pulkki, 1997) and then updated in 2000, when 54 additional articles including German and French literature were added.
In Section A of the Working Paper a variety of definitions of RIL are collected. Section B includes tabular summaries on location, descriptive information, logging intensity and cycle, residual density and utilization, site damage, economic aspects and the source of the information. The full summary of each report reviewed can be found in Section C.
There are still serious data deficiencies with regard to planning and inventory, and there is a serious lack of standards in data collection. Therefore, readers are invited to send their inputs and participate in the future development of a forest harvesting information system. It is hoped that this study will contribute to a worldwide dialogue on reduced impact logging.
Wulf Killmann
Director
Forest
Products Division