0849-B4
Pamela A. Wright, Gregory Alward, Matt Turner and Brent Tegler 1
The LUCID (Local Unit Criteria and Indicators Development) Project documents an initiative to monitor forest sustainability and a set of lessons learned over a three-year period by a group of dedicated National Forest Service employees and their partners. The project revealed that while we share a common goal of sustainable forest management, we all have different understandings of how to make progress, how fast to go and even sometimes in what direction. Together, however, we began to develop a common language to discuss our values and our perspectives, and together we made significant steps towards the development of a set of tools and a process to help others monitor their progress in a quest for sustainability. There are some common themes that stand out as key messages and lessons learned:
The establishment and implementation of a sustainability monitoring programme at the forest management unit scale represents one approach to sustaining systems; i.e. the contexts, that sustain us. As a result it represents the way to sustain our diverse perspectives on things that we individually value about healthy lands, healthy communities and healthy economies.
Sustainability is a compelling societal goal with widespread public appeal. However, what the term implicitly conveys and what it explicitly means are not necessarily the same. Finding a specific definition of sustainability that is broadly acceptable is difficult because it is about values that vary among groups and over time. This in turn makes it exceedingly difficult to develop acceptable measures of sustainability, yet there is a common desire to move towards sustainability.
Sustainability is not absolute; it is a human concept dependent on social values and involves multiple dimensions and scales, including those of time and space. As we become more aware of cross-scale interactions, decision makers increasingly seek to achieve simultaneous social, economic, and ecological benefits and tradeoffs. Given the range of human values and differing objectives for future social, economic, and ecological conditions, engaging in a public discourse about sustainability is critical. It requires human judgment about the condition or state of a set of tangibles. Inherent in sustainability is our positive valuation of tangibles that we wish to persist in time and space and this in turn is dependent on monitoring to provide good information for evaluation.
Nowhere has the struggle for sustainability and the debate over its meaning and goals been more focused than in relation to forests. As the debate has shifted focus from tropical to temperate forests, the larger dialogue about sustainability has been brought into our backyards. The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro renewed the international commitment to protect the integrity of the global environment while respecting the interests of all people. The United States and the other 173 signatory nations negotiated a non-binding companion agreement for sustainable forest management, Agenda 21, LUCID Technical Edition, Appendix 1 (Wright et al. 2002), and agreed to monitor, evaluate, and report on progress. The United States has committed to report periodically on the status of sustainable forest management across all ownerships, not just on National Forest System lands.
A primary strategy in the pursuit of sustainability is to focus on monitoring and assessment. To do so, we need to identify the critical components of social, economic, and ecological systems and then attempt to gather the appropriate information over time to help answer questions of about the state of these systems.
Information about specific elements of interest needs to be measured in a consistent fashion: defining and using indicators is one common approach. Indicators are simplified parts within complex systems that tell us something about a specific component or process of interest and are commonly used in everyday life. Many government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academic researchers use hierarchical frameworks to help design sets of indicators for sustainability monitoring programs. These frameworks are typically composed of two basic groups and are referred to as criteria and indicators (C&I). A recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) review of C&I for sustainable forest management (Castaneda et al. 2001) used the following definitions:
"Criteria define the range of forest values to be addressed and the essential elements or principles of forest management against which the sustainability of forests may be assessed. Each criterion relates to a key element of sustainability and may be described by one or more indicators."
"Indicators are parameters that measure specific quantitative and qualitative attributes and help monitor trends in the sustainability of forest management over time."
A C&I approach for assessing sustainability is an organizational tool. It can provide a common language for understanding sustainable management and can guide the monitoring process over time. Given the abstract nature of sustainability, the C&I hierarchy provides a structured approach to defining the parameters and goals of social, economic, and ecological sustainability and assessing progress toward them. Individual indicators are neither sustainable nor unsustainable; they do not reveal causality or direction. By considering a suite of systems-based indicators and measuring them over time, we hope to better understand social, economic, and ecological conditions, albeit in simplified form. This is one step on our quest for sustainability.
Much of the initial focus on developing indicators resulted from the need to report on national progress toward sustainable forest management. However, there has been growing realization that sustainability issues involve multiple scales and that achieving the national goals of sustainability largely rest on actions carried out at the local or forest management unit (FMU) scale.
The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), an international forestry research organization, has pioneered work on local-unit scale indicators for sustainable forest management. While their primary focus has been on tropical forests, CIFOR staff members have also been interested in applying their assessment methods to North American temperate forests. As a first step toward using FMU scale C&I in North America, CIFOR staff conducted a test in 1998 in partnership with the International Programs and Research branches and the Inventory and Monitoring Institute (IMI) of the USDA Forest Service on the Boise National Forest and surrounding areas. Experts from government, industry, and nongovernmental organizations from Canada, Mexico, and the United States participated. The CIFOR-North America (CIFOR-NA) test refined and adapted the CIFOR set of criteria and indicators for tropical forests to the social, economic, and ecological conditions of temperate North American forests. The results from this test were quite promising (Woodley et al. 1999).
The results of the preliminary CIFOR-NA test reported at the 1998 North American Forestry Commission meeting were well received and resulted in the Chief of the Forest Service chartering further work to tailor this approach to the specific needs of the agency. This resulted in the pilot project reported on here called the Local Unit Criteria and Indicators Development (LUCID) test. The intent of the LUCID test was for a core team of project coordinators from IMI to work with personnel (forest teams) at six national forest test sites to expand the science based development and evaluation of an FMU scale monitoring program for sustainability. Several participants in the CIFOR-NA test served on LUCID core team to build on the knowledge and experience gained from the Boise site. All LUCID participants hoped to develop one broadly applicable set of criteria and indicators that could be used by the Forest Service for both forested and non-forested systems.
The goal of the LUCID test was to establish a logical link from sustainability concepts to on-the-ground monitoring efforts for adaptive management. Starting from the strong foundation provided by the CIFOR-NA test, LUCID hoped to discover whether designing a systems-based C&I monitoring toolkit could provide forest managers and collaborators with feedback that could be used to improve Forest land and resource management plans, enhanced collaboration among National Forests, other governmental agencies, private landowners and stakeholders, and a means to relate forest plan outcomes with regional and national C&I trends.
The following five specific objectives were set to guide the project:
During an approximately two-year period, the LUCID core team worked closely with each participating forest team. Both the LUCID core team and the forest teams required a mix of skills to carry out the test. Ideally, this meant that each team was composed of at minimum: a sociologist, an economist and an ecologist to address the system components for each principle; an analyst/GIS specialist to address data management, modeling, and technical aspects; and a team leader, preferably with some planning background. LUCID test site forest supervisors also participated actively, providing policy insight on sustainability monitoring and making recommendations on practical implementation of FMU-scale sustainability monitoring.
The core team designed a process that provided some degree of flexibility for each of the six forest teams while ensuring consistency among the teams. Each forest team started with the same C&I hierarchy and followed the same steps while choosing its own collaborative partners, defining relevant scales, adapting the initial criteria and indicators, and developing measures, reference values, and synthesis tools appropriate to the test site. The forest teams began with the CIFOR-NA set of indicators (Hoekstra et al. 1999), supplemented with others provided by the core team based on their gap analysis of the CIFOR-NA set. Each forest team then screened the indicators for applicability to the local unit within the systems framework. The teams then developed one or more measures for each indicator, conducted a field test of the set of indicators, and tried various methods of analyzing, synthesizing, and reporting their results.
A systems-based framework for monitoring recognizes that systems of interest are a group of interrelated, interacting, or interdependent constituents forming a complex whole. This framework uses the structures and functions (processes) of systems as its organizing tools. It focuses on the contexts that allow for the production of goods and services, not just the goods and services themselves. A systems approach focuses on the outcomes or states of systems. A systems approach is particularly applicable to forests and rangelands since they are joint production systems with emergent properties that simultaneously, not independently, produce soil, water, air, plant, and animal material. Decision makers and managers risk failing to achieve their goals when they attempt to sustain components independently and at static levels because other processes and interactions may confound their expectations (Folke et al. 2002).
Monitoring within a systems framework seeks to collect sets of data over time that can provide us with information about the state of ecological, social, and economic systems, not just one-time images of the state of individual resources or elements. The goal of monitoring is to detect change. This means both collecting data and comparing it to what we understand about the ranges within which these systems normally operate (Innes 1998). Since systems are inherently dynamic rather than static, sustainability monitoring programs are intended to discern both the baseline patterns and fluctuations for various components and processes and to estimate human induced changes over and above this variability. Systems research indicates that a relatively small number of controlling processes or variables usually contribute to sustaining the functionality of a given system within a range of equilibrium states (Holling 2001), therefore a limited suite of well chosen indicators can provide the information needed to address questions about sustainability.
The LUCID project was initiated to develop a method for assessing systems sustainability at the local scale. The primary intent was to develop a tool that would provide feedback specifically at the FMU scale. In their evaluations, however, LUCID participants noted that the tool and techniques have application on a daily basis at a range of scales including at the project scale.
Teams reported many other specific benefits, including the following:
A major goal of the LUCID test was to test and refine the LUCID process itself, not just to produce a final suite of indicators. While this was an explicit goal, no one anticipated how engaging the process would become, or how important the forest teams would find it to be as they customized and tested the revised C&I at their sites. The process proved to be central to sustainability monitoring, not just the work required along the way to get to a final suite of indicators. The process of implementing a sustainability-monitoring program at the FMU scale emerged as a tangible product in its own right. A revised process for FMU-scale sustainability monitoring was one of the key outcomes of the LUCID test.
Teams also noted that the collaborative learning approach was fundamental to their success. The Forest Service does not traditionally monitor nor conduct work programs within a systems context. Forest teams were somewhat surprised to find that their ongoing dialogue about monitoring for sustainability in a systems framework was extremely beneficial, despite also being quite challenging.
LUCID participants found that the systems framework provided a new lens through which to view the topic of sustainability, both conceptually and practically. They agreed that a systems framework had several distinct benefits:
LUCID test participants affirmed that sustainability is a social concept and one that is incredibly valuable in practical application even though its definition may be elusive. They agreed that sustainability cannot be achieved by any one group of people, at one scale, and certainly not by the Forest Service acting alone. They recognized that agency personnel need to act on multiple fronts, on multiple scales, and with internal and external partners across physical, conceptual, and administrative boundaries. In the face of uncertainty and a multitude of competing stakeholder values, sustaining the fundamental systems contexts that sustain people is the surest way to move forward.
Establishing and implementing a sustainability-monitoring program at the forest management unit scale represents one approach to sustaining these systems. The LUCID test has clearly demonstrated that its approach can serve as a practical tool for managers, stakeholders, and citizens in their quest for sustainability at the local scale. The approach provides a means to share diverse perspectives on individual and collective values about healthy communities, healthy economies, and healthy lands in moving toward a sustainable future.
Castaneda, F., C., Palmberg-Lerche, and P. Vuorinen. 2001. Criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management: A compendium. FAO Forest Management Working Papers, Working Paper 5. Forest Resources Development Service, Forest Resources Division. FAO, Rome (unpublished).
Hoekstra, T. W., T. F. H. Allen, J. Kay, and J. A. Tainter. 1999. "Appendix H: Criteria and indicators for ecological and social system sustainability with system management objectives." In North American test of criteria and indicators of sustainable forestry. Volume 1. Compiled by S. Woodley, G. Alward, L. Iglesias Gutierrez, T. Hoekstra, B. Holt, L. Livingston, J. Loo, A. Skibicki, C. Williams, P. Wright. USDA Forest Service Inventory and Monitoring Institute Report No. 3. Available online at http://www.fs.fed.us/ institute/cifor/cifor_1.html.
Holling, C.S. 2001. "Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems." Ecosystems 4:390-405. Available online at http://www.resalliance.org/reports.
Innes, John L. 1998. "Measuring environmental change." In Ecological Scale, Theory and Application. Edited by D. L. Peterson and V. T. Parker. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 429-457.
Woodley, S. J., G. Alward, L. I. Gutierrez, T. W. Hoekstra, B. Holt, L. Livingston, J. Loo, A. Skibicki, C. Williams, and P. Wright. 1999. North American test of criteria and indicators of sustainable forestry. Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service Inventory and Monitoring Institute Report No. 3. Available online at http://www.fs.fed.us/institute/cifor/ cifor_1.html.
Wright, P. A., G. Alward, T. W. Hoekstra, B. Tegler, and M. Turner. 2002. Monitoring for forest management unit scale sustainability: The local unit criteria and indicators development (LUCID) test (technical edition). Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service Inventory and Monitoring Report No. 4. Available online at http://www.fs.fed.us/institute/lucid/ final_report/.
1 USDA Forest Service, Inventory and Monitoring Institute, 2150 Centre Avenue, Bldg. A, Suite 300, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. [email protected]