The Wildlife Professional - Spring 2010 2009

ers, sociologists, and environmentalists who offered a rigorous certification process to ensure sustainable forestry. Today, approximately 5 percent of the world’s forests are FSC certified (FSC Facts and Figures). Similarly the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, launched in 1994, has certified more than 135 million acres of forest land where local communities, landowners, and resource professionals across North America implement sound forest management measures to protect water quality, wildlife habitat, protected species, and biodiversity on their land. SFI recently launched a new standard that includes requirements for logger training. Approximately 117,000 loggers have been trained in sustainable forestry practices, which include methods to preserve young, medium-aged, and mature trees while logging a forest.

As long as the demand for wood products and agricultural land grows, forest degradation and deforestation will remain a global concern. According to The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the forest products industry is estimated at $150 billion per year, and every year more than 32 million acres of the world’s forests are logged, often illegally (TNC). The United States is a major contributor to the high demand. “The U.S. is an exporter of timber, it’s an importer of timber, it’s a processor of timber,” says Jack Hurd, director of TNC’s Asia-Pacific Forest Program, established to work with governments, land managers, communities, and corporations to encourage the legal trade of forest products.

To help prevent products of illegal logging from entering the U.S., in May 2008 Congress amended a law that’s part of the Farm Bill to comprehensively ban imports of illegally logged wood that has been cut in violation of a foreign nation’s laws, treaties, and regulations. The legislation “is changing the way companies across the global supply chain are thinking about their sourcing practices and traceability of their products,” Hurd says.

In addition, organizations such as the International Tropical Timber Organization and the World Bank, are addressing deforestation by establishing standards for sustainable tropical timber management and helping countries analyze their forest resources more rigorously. According to Hurd, more global attention and resources are now helping tropical forested nations “manage those forest resources in a more sustainable fashion.” Sustainable management will benefit not only wildlife and habitat, but also the air we breathe. Trees and the soils they grow in store vast amounts of carbon. Deforestation releases that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a major greenhouse gas contributing to

Selective harvest. Pine martens (Martes martes) and many other wildlife species require standing, hollowed-out trees to hide from predators, keep warm in northern winters, and bear their young. Forestry methods like single-tree harvest allow loggers to keep such trees in place.

Credit: Jonathan Gilbert/GLIF WC

global warming. To address this issue, at December’s climate summit in Copenhagen, five countries joined the U.S. in support of UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), pledging a total of $3.5 billion for the cause. The program will compensate landowners in developing countries for not cutting down forests, with an aim to eventually stop forest deforestation—an activity which contributes roughly 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Since the primary objective of REDD+ is to reduce carbon emissions, some researchers fear that REDD+ funding may go solely to forests with the greatest carbon-sequestration potential (such as Amazonian forests) rather than to those with higher numbers of threatened species (such as Asian forests). Targeted trade-offs could potentially resolve this problem. According to one study, REDD+ could distribute funds in such a way as to double potential biodiversity conservation while only reducing carbon sequestration potential by 4 to 8 percent (Venter et al. 2009). According to UN-REDD National Programme Officer Clea Paz, “special incentives are intended to be directed at areas with high biodiversity,” helping maximize the benefits of REDD+ beyond carbon.

As the eyes of the world focus on forests, scientists and forest managers are finding ways to address the complex tangle of issues that threaten the earth’s trees. No longer is forest management a simple question of conservationists versus loggers. “Those of us doing the science, we’re past that,” says Max Moritz. “It’s so much more complicated than that. So much more interesting than that.”