Multiple-use forest management in the humid tropics: opportunities and challenges for sustainable forest management

摘要

Présentation de l'éditeur : The multiple-value nature of forests has long been appreciated and used by forest-dependent people in the tropics. Explicitly managing for some or all of these values, multiple-use forest management, is stipulated in the laws of many countries, but its formal implementation in the tropics is thought to be rare. This paper reports on three regional assessments carried out to identify and draw lessons from on-the-ground initiatives in multiple-use forest management in the Amazon Basin, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. In all three regions, information was collected through interviews with country-based forestry experts, forest managers and technicians. A complementary, Web-based questionnaire further examined the reasons for the successes and failures of multiple-use forest management initiatives. The paper concludes that forest managers need more support if they are to realize the potential of multiple-use forest management. Greater effort is needed to eliminate unfair competition from operators whose sole objective is to extract timber, with little or no concern for multiple uses. In most countries, the demarcation of a permanent forest estate and the development of national land-use plans would increase investment in multiple-use forest management. Improving the value of logged-over forest through silviculture would also increase the uptake of multiple-use approaches