Managing Tropical Rainforests

8 Key excerpts on "Managing Tropical Rainforests"

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  Changing Landscapes

  The Development of the International Tropical Timber Organization and Its Influence on Tropical Forest Management

  • Duncan Poore(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Large areas of forest, especially in Southeast Asia, were stripped of all their valuable timber with little consideration for safeguarding future stocks. Nations and individuals became rich on the profits. Tropical forests now faced two threats: bad land use planning and bad forest management. The former had to be treated at the geographical level (national, sub-national and catchment), the latter at the level of the individual forest. 11 What came to be known as the sustainable management of a nation’s forests now had two components – the planning of land use (how to use each parcel of land for the purpose, or purposes, that provided the best lasting social advantage) and the management of its forests (how to manage each parcel of land both efficiently and sustainably for its chosen purpose). The concept of sustainable management – then known as conservation – was first clearly articulated in the World Conservation Strategy. 12 Its Introduction dealt with ‘living resource conservation and sustainable development’ – the first use of the latter term. Conservation was defined as: the management of human use of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit to present generations while maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations. Thus conservation is positive, embracing preservation, maintenance, sustainable utilisation, restoration, and enhancement of the natural environment. Living resource conservation is specifically concerned with plants, animals and micro-organisms, and with those non-living elements of the environment on which they depend

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  Tropical Forests, International Jungle

  The Underside of Global Ecopolitics

  • M. Smouts, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, Cynthia Schoch(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Appropriate measures should be taken to protect forests against harmful effects of pollution, including air-borne pollution, fires, pests and diseases, in order to maintain their full multiple value. The whole spirit of Rio and of sustainable development is contained therein: the list of present and future human needs to satisfy, a catalogue of resources provided by the forests and the dangers it faces, and a vague recommendation made to states to take “appropriate measures” to main- tain their full variety. Helsinki, Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe, June 1993: Sustainable management means the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfill, now and in the future, relevant ecological, eco- nomic and social functions, at local, national, and global levels, and that does not cause damage to other ecosystems. CONSERVING THE TROPICAL FOREST 185 186 Tropical Forests, International Jungle Developed in the context of a consultative process on forests in Europe involving 37 countries, this definition has been retained by the European Council in its regulation on Union action in the domain of tropical forests. 20 It is a dynamic vision that integrates both the short term and the long term, admits that there are different possible spatial scales for the relevant functions of the forest and relies on proper forest management (“stewardship”) to reconcile use and sustainability.This is, in fact, what is traditionally known in France as aménagement forestier (for- est management). A very similar definition of it is found in the 1989 French Memento du Forestier on tropical forestry: Management aims to guarantee over the long term the continuity of forest production in value and quantity, increasing it where pos- sible .

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  Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystems

  Biogeographical and Ecological Studies

  • H. Lieth, M.J.A. Werger(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 35 USE AND MISUSE OF TROPICAL RAIN FORESTS E.F. B R U E N I G EARLY HISTORY O F NATIVE F O R E S T USE The complexity and diversity of the tropical rain forest (Fig. 35.1) and its even climate pro-vided varied and rich diet, shelter and tranquillity needed for the evolution of man from arboreal man-ape to terrestrial hominid. Excessive brain capacity and low physical specialization helped early man out of paradisiacal existence into his modern role as an external disturbance factor. Terrestrial life and cultural development gradu-ally lead to ever more aggressive attitudes toward the environment. Initially, early man hardly affected the structure and functioning of the tropical rain-forest ecosystem. Locally, certain plant species might have been exterminated by over-use, or enriched by dispersal of propagules or removal of competitors. This remained more or less accidental, however, and had only very localized effects. In time, man's impact became more profound and intentional. Consequently, forest structure and functions were changed, but not seriously perturbed. Basically, the rain-forest ecosystems remained intact. Important food plants, such as sago-producing palms (Fig. 35.2), fruit-producing trees and medicinal plants were purposely aggregated and tended in convenient places. Eventually, the forest garden, a kind of Garden of Eden, emerged. These jungle gardens on good soils of easy access required little maintenance and hardly any hard work. So they could be run by the women while males remained more addicted to roaming the landscape for protein-rich food and adventure. These forest gardens as a land-use system persist in the form of individual home gardens or communal village gardens which are widespread in the humid tropics, and especially well developed and sophis-ticated in Southeast Asia (Fig. 35.3).

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  Conservation of Biodiversity and Natural Resources

  • Singh, M P, Soma Dey(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Daya Publishing House

    (Publisher)

  20 Management of Wildland Biodiversity A tropical nation or large multinational region has three basic kinds of land-use : urban, ever more intensively managed agroscape, and ever dwindling wildlands. The latter are generally patches of comparatively biodiverse habitats on socially or physically inaccessible sites or on “poor” agriculture soils. The urban habitat is viewed as productive even if restive. The agroscape is productive, with largely pacific and homogenized biodiversity. The wildlands largely are viewed as removable, conservable, or conserved, i.e. they have been set aside by someone “else” for strip-mining of their natural products or for social fossilization, outside of the national economy. They are like cash in a shoebox neither the bed, neither earning interest nor circulating, but of value to someone. This perception of tropical wildlands is unfortunate, and fortunately it is waning in popularity. There are encouraging nuclei of voices dotted across the tropical and extra-tropical landscape arguing that conservable and conserved tropical wildlands are a category of highly productive land-use. Such as a shift in social and economic attitudes demands that a conserved wildland be blessed with the level of planning, knowledge, investment, oversight, budget, technology, and political attention that long has been characteristic of the more productive sectors of the agroscape, and also of a nation’s institutions - highway systems, hospitals, education, and communication. Traditional tropical conserved wildland management -“fence it and put a guard on it”- is to such a blessing as a guard at the bank’s front door is to the stock market, Federal Reserve, free market economy, taxes, and trade barriers all rolled into one. We may anticipate a new edition of “potential land-use” maps for tropical countries. This is really what the “thou shalt inventory thy biodiversity” component of the Biodiversity Treaty is all about.

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  Routledge Handbook of Ecological and Environmental Restoration

  • Stuart K. Allison, Stephen D. Murphy, Stuart K. Allison, Stephen D. Murphy(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  23

  TROPICAL FOREST RESTORATION

  David Lamb

  Introduction

  Methods of restoring tropical forests are broadly similar to those used to restore forests in other biogeographical regions. That is, they involve identifying the relevant species to use and finding ways of assembling these to create diverse and sustainable new forest communities resembling the historical ecosystems once present at a particular site. But tropical regions also have several features that make this task a little different to that faced in most temperate regions. One is that tropical ecosystems often have higher levels of biodiversity, especially those in moister regions with short dry seasons. This means it can be difficult to identify all the species originally present because many are present in very low densities and are hard to find. One immediate consequence of this is it can be very difficult to make fully representative seed collections to begin the restoration process. A second difference is that temperatures are mostly warmer so that that growth and reproduction is often rapid and inter-specific competition can begin at a relatively early stage of the restoration process. Successional changes can be rapid and adaptive management is needed from a very early stage. A third factor is that deforestation is still ongoing in many tropical areas, in contrast to much of the temperate world where deforestation often occurred in the distant past. This means knowledge of the relevant biota and ecosystems is commonly incomplete and ecosystems are being destroyed before we understand the species involved, their taxonomy or how they interact or function. Each of these features has obvious implications for the ways in which restoration can be undertaken in tropical regions.

  But, in addition to these bio-physical features, there are several socio-economic factors that also make the task of tropical forest restoration different to that commonly practised in most temperate regions. One is that many of the people living in tropical landscapes are poor and sometimes lack food security. A second is that many landholders are likely to be unfamiliar with the technologies needed to undertake forest restoration and may be sceptical that restoration is something that will benefit them or their families. And, thirdly, policies and institutional frameworks concerning land tenure and land use planning are often fragmentary and still evolving.

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  Fragile Lands Of Latin America

  Strategies For Sustainable Development

  • John O. Browder(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Strategies for Tropical Rainforest Management Passage contains an image

  4 Economic Prospects from Tropical Rainforest Ethnobotany

  Ghillean T. Prance

  Introduction

  A few years ago the interdisciplinary association of economics and ethnobotany would have been an unusual topic for a paper. However, recent advances in the field of ethnobotany as well as the pressures to avoid deforestation by making natural areas economically productive have changed the situation and made the topic highly relevant. The ecological crisis facing the world’s tropical rainforests has helped to change the science of economic botany. If there is to be any hope for conserving tropical rainforests and their myriad of species it will be through a balance of conservation and utilization, through the development of sustainable systems of use. It is in this balance that economic botany and ethnobotany have much to offer.

  The rainforest crisis of today cannot be stressed enough. In spite of the growing grass roots awareness of the crisis in some tropical rainforest countries such as Brazil and the creation of a large network of reserves in others such as Costa Rica, the acuteness of the problem is growing and species loss is certainly accelerating. At the 1988 Brazilian Botanical Congress, held in Belém in late January, I was heartened by the emphasis on environmental issues and the Amazon rainforest crisis, which was the subject of three major symposia and many other contributed papers. On the other hand, I was shattered by the amount of information that indicates how much the crisis is accelerating in spite of the failure of many major development projects. In the dry season of 1987 Amazonia was undergoing the greatest destruction in its history and the forest was literally disappearing in smoke and flames at an unprecedented rate. Information gathered by the meteorological satellite NOAA-9 showed that at 4 p.m. on August 24, 1987 eight thousand square kilometers of rainforest were on fire (Anonymous 1987). The satellite image showed at least 6,800 individual fires in a rather small area of Amazonia that included the state of Mato Grosso, the eastern part of Rondônia and the south of Pará. We know that much destruction is going on in other regions such as the Northeast and east of Pará state, in the states of Roraima and Amapá and in certain parts of the large state of Amazonas. We cannot emphasize enough the gravity of the situation, and whatever our discipline may be, we must use our science to search for alternatives to this wanton destruction. I will present here a few of the ways in which the Institute of Economic Botany (IEB) of the New York Botanical Garden is addressing these issues through the sciences of economic botany and ethnobotany.

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  One World for One Earth

  Saving the environment

  • Philip Sarre, Paul Smith, Paul Smith with Eleanor Morris(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A recurrent theme has also been that of sustainability. The general concept of sustainable development as an ‘option for the future’ is examined in Chapters 9 and 10. In the case of the rain forests there are some signs that the wisdom of sustainable use is gaining ground. There is, after all, nothing new in the concept of ‘sustained yield’: indigenous forest dwellers have been practising just such an art for generations. In Endau Rompin, for instance, there is some cause to be optimistic in the participation of the Orang Jaku in future management schemes, and the concept of Extractive Reserves, first developed in the Amazon, is beginning to be used elsewhere.

  The challenge for sustainable development in the tropical rain forests is to ‘solve’ the conflict between resource exploitation, spurred on by the lure of short-term economic and/or political gain, and resource conservation with its message of long-term ‘wise’ economic use and management, which enhances rather than prejudices the livelihoods of the forest peoples. The question remains for the time being as to the balance of responsibilities for taking up this challenge between the more developed and the less developed world. Is there a tendency in the environmental debate to put too much blame on the former? The more developed countries are clearly cast as the traditional villains of the piece, but as the less developed countries ‘develop’ where does one end and the other start?

  A Japanese sponsored agro-forestry farm at Tomeacu, Paragominas, Brazil - a very successful example of sustainable farming, harvesting cocoa.

  The following box provides a starting point, at least for meeting some of the challenges:

  Achieving a sustainable future for the rain forests

  • Waiving the debt for less developed nations, negotiating ‘debt-for-nature’ swaps: any debt renegotiations would require strings to be attached. How could countries be made accountable for their actions in the environment? What sanctions could be operated?

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  Global Perspectives on Sustainable Forest Management

  • Okia Clement Akais(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  Section 1 Forest Management 1 Deforestation: Causes, Effects and Control Strategies Sumit Chakravarty 1 , S. K. Ghosh 2 , C. P. Suresh 2 , A. N. Dey 1 and Gopal Shukla 3 1 Department of Forestry 2 Pomology & Post Harvest Technology, Faculty of Horticulture Uttar Banga Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Pundibari 3 ICAR Research Complex for Eastern Region, Research Center, Plandu Ranchi India 1. Introduction The year 2011 is ‘The International Year of Forests’. This designation has generated momentum bringing greater attention to the forests worldwide. Forests cover almost a third of the earth’s land surface providing many environmental benefits including a major role in the hydrologic cycle, soil conservation, prevention of climate change and preservation of biodiversity (Sheram, 1993). Forest resources can provide long-term national economic benefits. For example, at least 145 countries of the world are currently involved in wood production (Anon., 1994 a ). Sufficient evidence is available that the whole world is facing an environmental crisis on account of heavy deforestation. For years remorseless destruction of forests has been going on and we have not been able to comprehend the dimension until recently. Nobody knows exactly how much of the world’s rainforests have already been destroyed and continue to be razed each year. Data is often imprecise and subject to differing interpretations. However, it is obvious that the area of tropical rainforest is diminishing and the rate of tropical rain forest destruction is escalating worldwide, despite increased environmental activism and awareness. Deforestation is the conversion of forest to an alternative permanent non-forested land use such as agriculture, grazing or urban development (van Kooten and Bulte, 2000).

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