| Abstract: | Abstract In planning of sustainable forest management, economic, environmental and social demands often conflict. Forest management in Southeast Asian tropical dipterocarp forests has been particularly biased towards maximizing immediate economic return from extensive logging. Overexploitation and other forms of uncontrolled land use within these forests have led to the situation where the remaining natural forests, most of them in Indonesia, will be liquidated within the next 10-15 years at the current rate of deforestation. In this paper we present an approach for sustainable forest management planning in which economic, environmental and social sustainability are considered simultaneously in order to define an optimal management strategy from a set of available alternatives. We carried out a case study within a rain forest logging concession in Indonesian Borneo by using a participatory planning approach involving interviews of the local people, environmental assessment and economic analyses. We used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for resource allocation and priority setting in order to identify an optimal strategy which yields a sustained economic output from timber production, while at the same time being environmentally and socioculturally sustainable. Despite their relatively high costs, strategies involving selective harvesting combined to complete restoration of original dipterocarp stock in logged-over areas were superior in terms of economic, environmental and social sustainability. Priorities set by local communities for the strategies to meet their socioeconomic and cultural needs coincide well with those ensuring the restoration and biodiversity. |
