Many people associate logging with the image of a bulldozer leaving behind a denuded landscape, but it is possible to harvest timber without causing collateral damage to other parts of a forest. Reduced-impact techniques allow loggers to fell and extract trees in a manner that reduces damage to other trees in the stand.
This approach also minimizes erosion, waste, and carbon emissions. A forestry business that does not protect its workers is not only unethical, but also unsustainable. Well-trained and healthy employees are essential to ensuring that these enterprises function safely and efficiently. In an examination of community-run forestry businesses in Brazil, certified enterprises did a far better job of protecting their workers than their noncertified peers. Members of certified enterprises were four times more likely to have taken part in a safety course; 94 percent of these businesses offered regular medical exams to their workers; all of the certified enterprises properly washed and stored their protective gear; and percent—four times as many as noncertified enterprises—offered medical attention to their employees when they were injured on the job.
For forestry businesses to be sustainable, they must operate in harmony with their surroundings. This means more than just the natural ecosystems in which they are located; it also applies to the human neighbors with which they co-exist. It means that a certified business must contribute to the social and economic development of a community by offering its members opportunities for employment and compensating indigenous groups for the traditional knowledge that they share regarding forest species and operations.
These are not only socially responsible steps, but they also benefit the environment. Providing jobs to local people, for example, can eliminate the incentive to engage in profitable but destructive activities such as wildlife poaching and illegal logging.
Sustainable forestry should have a positive economic impact on its practitioners. And in Mexico, a large FSC-certified community forestry enterprise that received technical assistance from the Rainforest Alliance increased its production volume, while staying within the parameters for sustainable harvesting; created an additional jobs a 12 percent increase over the baseline ; and earned a 10 percent price premium for the wood that it sold to a certified buyer.
Learn More ». Article What is Sustainable Forestry? Share Facebook. Sign up for useful tips to green your life and protect our planet. Forestry worker, Jair Tintinago, sits next to his work at a certified pine tree farm in Colombia.
On many days in , forest fires in Indonesia produced more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire US economy. Net deforestation is responsible for about 10 percent of climate emissions.
When you consider that forests can remove carbon from the atmosphere too, protecting tropical forests while restoring damaged forests could contribute up to 24—30 percent of the potential climate solution. Meanwhile, coastal mangrove forests serve as breeding grounds and nurseries for a wide variety of fish, crustaceans, and other sea life.
Thirty percent of the fish catch in southeast Asia and 60 percent of commercial fish species in India rely on mangroves at some stage of their life cycle. Tropical forests are extraordinarily diverse, ranging from high montane cloud forests to lowland seasonally flooded forests to dry deciduous forests, each with its own distinct array of plant and animal life.
One square kilometre of tropical rainforest in Malaysia can contain more tree species than all of the United States and Canada; a single tree in the Peruvian Amazon may be home to more ant species than the entire British Isles. Conserving tropical forests protects the habitat of two-thirds of all species, including some of the most charismatic: jaguars, gorillas, orangutans, and birds of paradise.
CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions. View the discussion thread.
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Ecotourism, conservation and education Conservation is all about the protection, preservation, management, or restoration of tropical forests and the ecological communities that inhabit them. In this case conservation would seek to manage human use of natural resources in tropical rainforests for sustainable social and economic uses. Another sustainable use is the development of ecotourism. The tourist stay in wooden huts, there is limited electricity, waste is dealt with on site and the food is sourced locally.
All of the tour guides are local. International agreements about the use of tropical hardwoods. There are also international agreements on the uses of tropical hardwoods and logging.
The International Tropical Timber Agreement was set up in to "promote the expansion and diversification of international trade in tropical timber from sustainably managed and legally harvested forests and to promote the sustainable management of tropical timber producing forests". Debt reduction.
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