Assessing sustainability for global forests: a proposed pathway to fill critical data gaps

The UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other regional and national policy commitments have motivated an upsurge of interest in concepts and practical methods for monitoring forest conditions and trends at very wide geographic scales. Two approaches to sustainability assessment at a global level are reviewed here. One consists of monitoring change in forest conditions over time—the so-called Criteria and Indicators (C&I) approach. Another approach compares nations at a given point in time. An example is the Yale Environmental Performance Index (EPI). Both approaches yield insights. It is widely recognized, though, that severe data weaknesses afflict forest information over much of the world. These weaknesses include weak or absent information on wood consumption in many regions, poor area estimates, and weak or absent information on key ecological conditions in forests. The purpose of this essay is to introduce these efforts at global assessment, and to argue that an entirely new discipline is needed to supply the information needed. The focus of this new discipline would be to design an ecologically based set of definitions for forest and related ecosystems, and then to build and implement the optimum combination of satellite measurements, air photo interpretation, and field plot measurements needed to measure world forest resource conditions and trends. Examples of this new approach are already appearing. This argument is addressed to members of the global forest policy community concerned with assessment, and to scientists, technologists, and managers in the many technical fields already engaged on one or another aspect of measuring and monitoring forest conditions at a national and regional scale.