Global Vision
for Forest 2050
project

G. Bull and J. Spears

Gary Bull is in the Faculty of Forestry and the
Liu Centre of Global Issues, University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
John Spears is Senior Environmental
Advisor, Alliance for Forest Conservation
and Sustainable Use, World Bank, Washington,
DC, United States.

The Global Vision for Forest 2050 project is an attempt to build more effective links among the multiple objectives of forest management, including:

• poverty alleviation, sustainable livelihoods and protection of the rights of forest-dependent indigenous communities;
• broader goals of sustainable development, including continuity of supplies of raw material for forest-based industries;
• preservation of biodiversity, carbon sequestration and other local and global environmental values of forests.

The vision is for a landscape-based forest use regime that deals with competing land uses by apportioning the natural forest into three distinct categories (see Figure). For example:

• some 40 percent of the forest land base could be under some form of non-industrial management such as indigenous forestry, community forestry or woodlot management;
• some 20 percent could be zoned for industrial roundwood production;
• as much as 40 percent could be set aside as protected areas.

Naturally the details would vary from country to country according to the ecological, social, political and economic conditions. A scheme for Canada has been proposed, for example, by the Canadian Senate Subcommittee on the Boreal Forest.

RESEARCH ISSUES

The project is currently organizing a research programme in conjunction with key members of the international forestry community. Such research will have at least three principal benefits:

• It will contribute to the resolution of continuing conflicts among stakeholder groups with sharply differing perceptions of how and by whom forests should be managed and for whose benefit.
• It will provide policy-makers with a basis for decision-making and improved directing of scarce resources towards those policy changes and activities that will most benefit both people and forests in the transition period ahead.
• It will help to speed global forest recovery.

These are just a few of the issues that the Global Vision research project will begin to tackle:

Protected areas

• How will society pay for the management of protected areas?
• How can the biological and social challenges that will inevitably arise be handled?
• How should buffer zones be managed?

Timber production areas

• What is the appropriate level of management intensity that still constitutes sustainable forest management?
• How can industrial production forests be managed for a host of non-timber values?

Non-industrial forestry

• What is the role of the indigenous community, and how can its managerial capacity be built up?
• What is an appropriate interface between agriculture and forestry?
• What are fair taxation policies for non-industrial landowners?
• How do non-industrial and protected-area forms of management overlap?

A possible global forest situation by year 2050⁽¹⁾

PARTICIPATION

The Global Vision project will provide a forum for comprehensive discussions among a wide range of international and research agencies. Participating institutions currently include FAO, the World Bank, the Worldwilde Fund for Nature (WWF), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Canadian Forest Service, the European Forest Institute (EFI), and the Liu Centre for Global Issues and the Faculty of Forestry of the University of British Columbia, plus a host of research agencies in developed and developing countries. Experts in a wide range of disciplines from more than 30 countries, including those in the tropics and those in Eastern European, participated in a meeting held in October 2000, and more countries are expected to join in the subsequent months.

For more information contact: Gary Bull
Faculty of Forestry and the Liu Centre for Global Issues - University of British Columbia - Vancouver, BC, Canada - url: www.oneforest.org

¹ In all four categories of forest land use depicted in this chart, including timber and fibre production forest, it is assumed that objectives of management will incorporate preservation of biodiversity and other environmental benefits.