The term "sustainable" is now widely applied to a host of materials - steel, plastics, concrete and aluminium for example - that obviously aren't sustainable. Sustainable wood is different. It comes from sustainably managed forests. These are not only a renewable resource, but are also managed so as to prevent damage to eco-systems, watersheds, and other forest values.
The first effort to define sustainability came in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Prime Minister Brundtland of Norway. This report defined sustainable development as “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
The Brundtland definition was expanded on and applied in depth to forests at the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit. In fact, even now, the forest sector remains the only major international commodity sector where there is worldwide international agreement on the key elements of sustainable production. The forest sector has led the way to translate “sustainability” from a nice idea on paper into a fundamental determinant of action on the ground.
Most other sectors are still at the “nice idea on paper” stage, or worse, they have simply adopted the term when marketing their efforts to chip away at their considerable environmental burdens. “Sustainable wood” is much more than this. Through its increased use, it can make a major positive contribution to the world’s environment.
To get back to the point in hand, at the 1992 Earth Summit, the international community agreed a “Non-Legally Binding Authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of all Types of Forests” which states that:
“Forest resources and forest lands should be sustainably managed to meet the social, economic, ecological, cultural and spiritual needs of present and future generations. These needs are for forest products and services, such as wood and wood products, water, food, fodder, medicine, fuel, shelter, employment, recreation, habitats for wildlife, landscape diversity, carbon sinks and reservoirs, and for other forest products. 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”.
There are several implications of this broad definition of sustainability when applied to forest management:
- While sustainability encompasses the concept of “sustained yield”, which refers to the continuing ability of forests to supply timber, the services that a forest provides go much further than this. Sustainability implies the long term maintenance of all forest functions including ecological and landscape conservation, soil protection, recreation, aesthetic values, as well as the production of timber and other forest products.
- It is important to realise that the management of a forest for a single product will affect the forest’s ability to provide other services or products, so trade-off’s have to be made. For example, managing the forest for high levels of timber production may affect the value of the forest as a habitat for wild animals.
- Sustainable forestry is also a moving target. It is about satisfying people’s needs. Just as these vary from place to place and through time, so the definition of sustainable forestry varies. For example, in developed countries, many people now attach greater significance to forests as areas for recreation. By contrast, in many developing countries, there is a much greater reliance on forests as a source of food, of employment and for economic development. So you can expect standards of “sustainable forestry” to vary between developed and developing countries.
In practice, the process of actually defining sustainable forestry involves two stages. At international level, through a variety of United Nations processes, governments have established a series of international principles for sustainable forest management. Examples of these processes include:
- The Pan European or Helsinki Process – covering all European forests
- The International Tropical Timber Organisation covering all the major tropical wood producing countries
- The Montreal Process, covering all forests in boreal and temperate zones outside Europe (including North America, Russia, Australasia, Chile)
The second stage involves interpretation and adaptation of the international sustainability principles into national forest policy, laws and regulations. This requires consultation with a wide range of interests in an effort to establish consensus on the contents of sustainable forestry standards. It also requires field testing of sustainable forestry standards.
These UN-led processes have been on-going now for around two decades. Countries have been progressing at different rates. For obvious reasons, richer and more politically stable countries have tended to move faster than poor and politically unstable countries. But the progress is real and, in the wake of these processes, sustainability now lies at the very heart of forest policy, regulation and practice in most of the world’s largest timber producing countries.
The UN processes have also provided a starting point for various private sector initiatives such as the FSC and PEFC. These forest certification frameworks have evolved to adapt the sustainable forestry standards to better reflect the views of the specific interests engaged in the development of the certification system and to provide procedures for independent inspection of individual forests.