The Sustainable Development Goals need to recognise that forestry is broader than environmental protection – it also relates to poverty, food security, resilient landscapes and green growth. Mindy McAdams

Last week, the UN High-level Panel on Post-2015 Development Agenda met in Bali, Indonesia. The political commitment from last year’s Rio+20 conference to agree on a set of post-2015 goals addressing the broad challenges of poverty eradication, environmental protection and sustainable consumption and production (the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs) remains strong.

At the same time, there is a flurry of ideas on what the goals should be and how progress should be measured. Often these proposals come from organizations forwarding the topics that they are mandated to deal with. This can make it difficult to maintain an overview of what we would actually like to achieve in the future.

Despite the risk of adding to the confusion, here I provide some thoughts on a possible configuration of the SDGs, including a goal on landscapes. While the landscape topic is obviously close to the mandate of CIFOR and the CGIAR, the ambition in this blog is to provide some thoughts on how to broaden the perspective of the SDGs.

It is worth recalling that the SDG development process has already been much more ambitious than it was for the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that they are set to replace. The MDGs were not specified in the Millennium Declaration in 2000 – the goals, targets and indicators were prepared afterwards, based on general agreement. While the 2005 World Summit acknowledged the MDGs, it was as a set of a wider range of international development goals. It was only in 2010, that the UN General Assembly more firmly established the commitment to achieve the MDGs. In contrast, the SDG goals and targets are set to be agreed on upfront, hence the current attention that has been placed on the negotiation process.

Furthermore, the SDGs are expected to be less oriented to Official Development Assistance (ODA). By comparison, one of the MDGs (number 8 – “Develop a global partnership for development”) was dedicated to ODA. With a more generic approach to development, the SDGs can be more inclusive of the much larger investment potential from the private sector, as well as the public sector beyond ODA.

Finally, the MDGs were constructed in a way that does not always encourage cross-cutting contributions. Forests and forestry, for example, were parked under the environment goal, within the target related to reversing loss of environmental resources, and with the one indicator “Proportion of land area covered by forest”.  Obviously, this does not convey the broader contributions of forests and forestry to development, including poverty, food security, resilient landscapes and green growth. Instead, this may have reinforced the view that forests are only about environmental protection.

With this background in mind, I’d now like to outline some thoughts on the configuration of the SDGs, and how a goal on landscapes could be defined.

Five is a good number for SDGs

-   Defining SDGs and related global targets in a national and local priority setting is difficult because many special interests promote their own agendas. For example, developed countries’ institutions/politics often strongly advocate the environment dimension of sustainable development.

-   Simplified, understandable, integrated and measurable goals/targets/parameters are needed.

• The MDG framework does not provide a convincing starting point.
• There should be no more than four to six SDGs.

-   Political leadership is needed to cut across sectors/special interests and move on from the MDGs.

• Especially considering developing/emerging countries’ situation where the nexus of social, economic and environmental development is obvious and crucial.

-   The rural economies including agriculture, forestry and fisheries have often been underrepresented in development frameworks such as the MDGs. Yet, they represent some of the largest issues and potentials for all dimensions of sustainable development in all regions.

-   With the above in mind, a possible set of SDGs are:

1. Sustainable landscapes (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food, biodiversity, water, climate)
2. Social protection (health services, rule of law, relief of food insecurity and extreme poverty)
3. Green growth with equity (all economic sectors including finance, greenhouse gas emissions)
4. Infrastructure for all (energy, roads, internet, markets, safe water and sanitation)
5. Equal opportunities (gender, education, employment, human rights)

-   Each goal could have its own development paradigm, allowing for some overlaps between the goals.

-   Each goal could have a set of three to five targets, with one measure per target.

-   Implementation of goals through targets, indicators, planning and investments should be scalable from global to local levels, and should be measureable at all levels and scales. 

A goal on sustainable landscapes

-  We need a new paradigm for development and environment that counteracts current silos between agriculture, forestry, fisheries and conservation.

-   While the landscape concept is not new, it can be redefined to:

• Fit into the SDG framework as one of its goals.
• Connect to broader development goals such as poverty, food security, climate change, green growth, rights, governance and gender.
• Allow for clear and understandable measurements of progress:
  • Generic landscape objectives, applicable anywhere.
  • Few and scalable measurements against objectives.
  • Find better solutions beyond neoclassical economic methods.
  • Facilitate multi-objective, multi-stakeholder priority setting and planning

- With such a paradigm, we could also:

• Attract large scale private investments (with some publicly funded risk management)
• Advance land and resource tenure processes.
• Stimulate markets for the bio-based economy.

- Some requirements needed are:

• Application of political leadership to cut across silos at all levels
  • E.g. Connect forestry and agriculture in the annual UNFCCC negotiations (don’t miss the Global Landscapes Forum at COP19 in Warsaw).
• Investment in long-term cross-cutting research to support evidence-based policies.

Figure 1

- Four proposed landscape objectives with performance measures are shown in the above figure.

• The performance measures are applicable anywhere at any scale, including the global scale.
• If all four are stable or improving, we can say that we have a sustainable landscape that contributes to development goals.
• These four objectives and performance measures can also be used to define targets, such as:

This is, of course, only a contribution to the discussion; there are many views that need to be consolidated. CIFOR and its partners are currently working on landscape approaches as a way to find better solutions for the land-based sectors, working across the agriculture and forestry boundaries. Thinking about landscapes in the context of SDGs therefore comes naturally to us.

I look forward to a continued dialogue!

Today is the first annual International Day of Forests. From 1972 until now, 21 March was celebrated as World Forestry Day, but last year the UN General Assembly upgraded it to an official UN Observance Day.

There are currently 115 international days proclaimed by the UN, and 21 March is a particularly popular date. It is also World Poetry Day, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the International Day of Nowruz, and World Down Syndrome Day. In addition, 2013 is the international year for Water Cooperation as well as for Quinoa, and we are in the international decades of Biodiversity, Action for Road Safety, Eradication of Colonialism, among others. UN protocol is not always easy to follow, but an app has been developed to help us keep track of the Observances.

At CIFOR, we have looked for a fresh angle for today’s celebrations. As a forestry organization with an intensive communications program, we already focus on raising awareness every day. It seems inappropriate to use this day for even more promotion of our activities. Further, it appears to me that most people are already aware of the forests. However, the common perception is that forests are under threat and need to be protected from human destruction. Deforestation, illegal logging, forest fires, loss of biodiversity, droughts – the list of problems is long and well known. Our increasingly urbane society is bombarded by such negative messages about forests and the campaigns may not be entirely balanced.

With this in mind, I suggest we use the International Day of Forests to share positive views about forests and trees: Forests provide income, food and energy for billions of people. They accumulate a big portion of the greenhouse gases we emit. Trees make landscapes stable, productive and aesthetic. Planted forests protect soils and provide renewable materials for the green economy. Forests preserve biodiversity and provide for recreation and shelter.

So use this day to think positively about forests. Personally, I will celebrate by planting another tree (Shorea Guiso, a dipterocarp with many uses for its wood, including furniture and flooring) on CIFOR’s Bogor campus.

I would like to leave you with one further suggestion. Use today to connect the forests to the landscape and to our wider society and needs. According to the UN resolution, today is not just about forests, but about the entire landscape. We are asked by the General Assembly to “celebrate and raise awareness of the importance of all types of forests and of trees outside forests.” Don’t limit your focus to the forest as such or you will miss the bigger picture.

Happy International Day of Forests!

This report illustrates well how the food system must be seen as part of the overall sustainability equation and conversely how forestry and the wider landscape needs to integrate with the food system.

The lead article, Walk the Talk, by IFPRI’s Director General, Dr. Shenggen Fan, led me to make some notes with additional thoughts below.

• There is no lack of political commitments in the food and land space at the moment. Rio+20 talked about zero hunger and zero net land degradation. G20 and G8 have highlighted the need for investments in agriculture and nutrition. So how do we implement these commitments and how do we measure progress?

• There are high expectations on what we call the “green economy”. At the centre of this aspiration is a “bioeconomy” that integrates contributions from land-based sectors to inclusive green growth as a key component of sustainable development. Herein lies huge opportunities for rural economies, including forestry, and rural poor worldwide – provided the access to capital and markets evolve, with relevant conditions on sustainability outcomes for these. But we seem to lack a policy roadmap. Shall we look to the SDG process to deliver on this?

• The report highlights the need to move from quantitative measures of food security that are based on calorie intakes toward measures that include qualitative aspects of nutrition. Calorie measures can misrepresent important nutrition needs and underrepresent the opportunities of forestry for contributing to nutrition. As well, there is a risk that calorie-oriented agriculture policies may not lead to the best management of natural resources.

• Food prices continue to be a major factor for food security politics, but we should be alert to protectionist measures that may arise and how these can affect other sustainability objectives. Keeping food prices down may help in the short term to make food affordable, but the implications for farmers’ livelihoods and how natural resources are managed may be significant.

• We are starting to see a long-awaited higher focus on gender issues in agriculture and the rural economies. I do agree with Dr. Fan that we need more gender-disaggregated information and evidence to ensure that these policies are mainstreamed.

• We must pay attention to mega-trends and long-term drivers. One of these is urbanization and the effects of growing wealth on consumption patterns, but another is the attractiveness of farming as a profession. Agriculture and forestry must be profitable and dynamic to attract young people.

• Another mega-driver is the intersection of agriculture and forestry with energy production and consumption. With 30% of our energy consumed in the food system and 10% of overall energy provided by renewable biomass, the energy needs and expectations from the land-based sectors will be a key topic for sustainability and food security.

I strongly recommend you read the full report!

Forestry needs to stay relevant to the bigger picture. Yayan Indriatmoko, Mokhamad Edliadi and Douglas Sheil

We seem to have a new debate in international forestry circles following our recent initiative to hold a global forum on landscapes at the 2013 UNFCCC COP in Warsaw.

Most reactions to our combining of the former forest and agriculture days have been overwhelmingly positive and supportive. Creating an alliance between forestry and agriculture is a bold move, but one that is widely appreciated. These supporters recognize, as we do, that continuing with isolated sectoral approaches on either side of an arbitrary line in the landscape is generally ineffective; solutions for a sustainable future with green growth must be cooperative, not divisive. Our partners in the CGIAR and those beyond share this view and stand behind a landscape approach.

But we have also heard some arguments against such an approach. In embracing the opportunity to collaborate with our agriculture colleagues, some are concerned that we are placing forestry’s identity at risk. They believe that forestry will be overwhelmed by other larger sectors and interests like farming and food security.

It also seems that the international debate on forestry is narrower than ever. I recently had the honour of presenting a keynote at the World Forests Summit, an excellent conference organized by the Economist in Stockholm on 5-6 March. But by the mid-point of the conference, a number of panellists had spoken only of deforestation, forest carbon management and carbon trading, and I wondered – “is this what has become of forestry?” Although unintentional, their inputs did not reflect the thoughtful words of HRH the Prince of Wales, who in his opening address applauded a wider landscape approach in meeting the global challenges to which forestry is related.

So I ask: when did forestry start down on this protective course? Why are only some forestry-related issues present in the international debate? Why are the links between forestry and so many core development challenges — poverty, food security, health, and green growth — so absent in the debate? I don’t claim to have the answers. These are, however, questions that should be asked again as we set priorities for forestry research and development.

Consider the results of UNCED 1992. In addition to establishing the main UN process for sustainable development, the summit was the birthplace of the three Rio Conventions on Climate Change, Biodiversity and Desertification. We are all aware of the high profile of these conventions over the past 20 years, and their impact on the sustainability agenda both at national level and at the global level in other intergovernmental processes such as G20.

Why are the links between forestry and so many core development challenges — poverty, food security, health, and green growth — so absent in the debate?

The forestry community also had high hopes for a convention heading into UNCED 1992, but was rewarded with only the non-binding Forestry Principles. Unlike its cousins Climate Change, Biodiversity and Desertification, forestry was not as such considered an inter-governmental issue, but rather a matter of national sovereignty or local priorities. Thus, no convention.

Since then, international forestry has struggled with its non-convention status, seemingly forever recognized as a side issue in other processes as described in this Unasylva edition on Global conventions related to forests. Instead, the United Nations Forum on Forests, UNFF, has become something of a substitute forest convention. Other international forest-specific initiatives such as the criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, tropical forestry action plans, the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, FAO’s regional forestry commissions and Committee on Forestry, and a decision in 2011 to establish a European forest convention have all operated in the wake of UNCED 1992, but without quite achieving the same political attention as the Rio Conventions, and often with a forest-centric perspective.

Then along came REDD. Almost as a shock treatment, COP13 in Bali in 2007 agreed to take steps towards reducing emissions from deforestation (mainly), and donors put money on the table to kick-start the process. Never before had billions of dollars from donors been made available for international forestry purposes. Never before had so many heads of state talked so warmly about forests.

Traditional forestry institutions had mixed reactions – after all, this came from a Rio Convention and not from any of the forestry processes – but they eventually woke up to the new financial and political reality. A reality that has now dominated international forestry for the past half decade and fuelled investments in forestry research and capacity development across the world. No wonder so many conference speakers now talk about forest carbon trading rather than sawmill investments.

There is every reason to be grateful for the attention on forests and climate change and the financial and political opportunities brought forward. But it may also be time to reconnect forests and forestry to the broader development agenda. With the forests and climate change agenda in mind, it may sound meagre to argue for a landscape approach, with no promises of matching finances, only the prospect of sharing the stage with agriculture – a sector believed, in some forestry circles, to largely ignore forestry issues.

Introducing a landscape approach to forestry is neither new, nor does it threaten forestry’s identity

However, with this somewhat inward looking focus of international forestry sector over the past decades, we seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture aspirations: poverty reduction, food security, health, green growth and dealing with climate change, and how forestry can contribute to all of these.

Looking back, it is useful to remember that the 1985 International Year of the Forest had food security as its theme. The 1972 World Forestry Congress focused on forests and socio-economic development. In the very first Unasylva in 1947, biblical references illustrate that with the disappearance of Lebanese cedar forests, so too disappeared the “…fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams.”

More recently, one of the recommendations from Forest Day 2 in Poznan in 2008 was that we should ”take into account local conditions and integrate landscape and ecosystem approaches in order to facilitate greater societal and environmental benefits”.

From CIFOR’s perspective, let me assure you that we continue to build the identity and knowledge base of forestry as we have done over the past 20 years. Every day, our scientists and partners research and recommend policies that help ensure the sustainable development of the world’s forests, conserve the biodiversity they embrace, the carbon they store, and protect the livelihoods and cultures of the people who depend on them. As we enter the next 20 years, we will make sure that forestry stays relevant to the bigger picture and for a broader audience.

So, introducing a landscape approach to forestry is neither new, nor does it threaten forestry’s identity. Rather, it helps build and maintain forestry’s identity by placing forestry back where it truly belongs: in the landscape, together with agriculture – partners in creating a sustainable future.

Elements of a systematic review, adapted from Petrokofsky et al. 2011 and reproduced by kind permission of the Commonwealth Forestry Association

There are increasing expectations that policies should be evidence based. This extends to the use of public funds for development assistance, for example Government initiatives such as those promoted by national Governments and supported by initiatives such as those of the Overseas Development Institute’s RAPID programme, Research to Action and 3ie.

While recognizing that scientific research is an important source of evidence, it is important to clarify that science does not per se provide answers to policy issues, nor is it the only source of what counts as authoritative evidence (1). Some of this confusion is reflected in the way that evidence-based approaches have sometimes been criticized for usurping other forms of evidence and for suggesting technological solutions to complex socio-economic problems. These same critics, however, are also arguing for effective decision-making that is based on sound evidence. For example, in international climate change policy, huge efforts have been made to clarify the knowledge base and inform decision-makers of available evidence, but those same decision-makers remain largely indecisive. This appears to depend more on the decision-making process than on the quality and volume of evidence provided. There is much more going on here: it is not a simple linear relationship between good science and good policy.

In a significant policy paper, such as the recently leaked internal evaluation of World Bank forestry operations, it is important that its analysis is systematic, transparent and inclusive of available information, as discussed in this CIFOR blog entry. Otherwise, the paper, and subsequent commentaries and decisions, can quickly be considered biased or ignorant, or both.

The evidence process is iterative. It entails defining the policy questions and subsequently reviewing the state of knowledge that is available to answer this question. This can lead to new priorities in research, as well as a re-examination of the initial policy framework. In addition, new results can be added to the body of knowledge, potentially improving the quality of conclusions.

It is worth recalling J. Nisbet’s words from over a century ago: “Forestry… may be called the younger sister and the servant of Agriculture. Each of these arts is essential to the welfare of nations, and no people can be said to be wise, politic, or economic which does not pay attention to the advancement of both.” (1)

The value of forestry in shaping landscapes is as important now as it was when Nisbet was working as a professional forester. However, he would have been surprised by the dramatic shifts in the services and products that woodlands of the 21st century are expected to deliver. And there are new challenges as well, with rapid environmental change, different pests and diseases, and novel economic and social conditions to consider.

Many of these changing directions and uncertainties require new forest policies and research to guide decisions and achieve beneficial outcomes for society. This places heavy demands on science to provide the information to form sound, evidence-based policy. However, it is not necessary always to commission new research to provide answers to new policy questions or new ways of looking at the world’s most serious problems. The existing knowledge base contains a huge volume of potentially highly relevant research, much of it of very high quality. The challenge is to mine it and analyse the findings in ways that support unbiased policy making.

One current re-examination of a policy framework is the broadening of perspectives on forestry and agriculture leading towards a landscape approach, to pursue better and combined solutions in meeting food security, climate change, nature conservation and poverty challenges. To inform existing institutional and policy arrangements about the benefits of moving to a landscape approach, a solid evidence base is key. Otherwise, there is a risk that (in this case)  sections of the forestry community may continue to focus on isolated issues like timber concessions and protected areas, since these are easily defined and institutionally convenient to deal with.

With these priorities in mind, CIFOR made a strategic decision to introduce an evidence-based forestry initiative as an important component of our work in 2013. Currently in the initial phases of this initiative, CIFOR is joined by the University of Oxford and key partner organizations to develop a programme that will put robust evidence at the heart of our work.

A significant part of the role of CIFOR and its partner organizations in international forestry research is to provide evidence for policy processes, whether directly through defined research projects or indirectly through policy-makers and other stakeholders using our published outputs. These outputs can be our peer-reviewed research papers or they may be informal publications, such as our irregular statements made through social media channels (Twitter, blogs, etc.). In all cases, it is fundamental to have high standards and well-defined approaches to assessing the quality of the evidence.

Many sectors have well-established procedures for using systematic, evidence-based approaches to science–policy dialogue and action. These include health care (Cochrane Collaboration, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2013), social welfare (Campbell Collaboration, which has been active since 2000), and environmental conservation (Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, which started operating in 2006).

Systematic reviews are at the heart of the evidence-based initiatives in these fields. They are powerful information tools that aid good decision-making: without systematic reviews there is no evidence-based medicine. But systematic reviews are not yet a common practise in the forestry community, despite the fact that the demand for decision-making to be based on evidence continues to grow (2). Terms like ‘evidence-based policy’ are used freely in international and national policy briefings in forestry, largely without definition (3).

The sheer volume of forest science published in the international literature, and the cost and difficulty of reading through it to gain understanding of complex, often conflicting, messages are daunting for policy-makers. As Roger Pielke wryly observed in his influential book The Honest Broker:

“The scientific enterprise is diverse enough to offer information that can be used to support a diversity of perspectives on just about any subject… deciding a course of action and then finding information to support it is common across the political spectrum”

Systematic reviews were originally developed to stop this ‘cherry-picking’ of scientific (and other) evidence in medicine. They are designed to handle large numbers of studies without introducing additional biases.

CIFOR aims to draw on the experiences and expertise of these other fields to scope the potential for establishing a similar ‘collaboration without walls,’ producing systematic reviews as a core activity. We are excited to be working with our key partners on this initiative and to start a collaborative process of improving the quality of evidence used to make decisions for some of the most pressing problems that challenge sustainable development in the 21st century.

In future blogs I will discuss how CIFOR intends to create a pipeline of highly relevant systematic reviews that address some of our high priority concerns. I will also discuss how the principles of evidence-based forestry can apply to social media outputs as well as to high-quality systematic reviews.

For more information on the evidence-based forestry initiative, please contact Gill Petrokofsky or Peter Kanowski.

I am grateful to Gill Petrokofsky for her valuable contributions and input to this post.

Bibliography

1. Sutherland W.J, Bellingan L, Bellingham J.R, Blackstock J.J, Bloomfield RM, et al., 2012. A collaboratively-derived science-policy research agenda. PLoS ONE 7(3): e31824. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031824

2. Nisbet J., 1905. The Forester. [2 Volumes] UK: William Blackwood and Sons.

3. European Commission, 2010. Evidence-based policy versus policy-biased evidence: the challenge of feeding scientific advice into policy-making. Conclusions of the High-Level Trans-Atlantic Science for Policy Workshop, October 2009, Ispra, Italy.

4. Petrokofsky G., Holmgren P., Brown N.D., 2011. Reliable forest carbon monitoring: systematic reviews as a tool for validating the knowledge base. International Forestry Review 13(1):56-66.

Shawn/Save the Children USA

The political talks towards new global goals are on. The Rio+20 congregation came up with the idea to agree on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that would set the stage for action under the post-2015 development agenda and supposedly define “The future we want” as stipulated in the Rio+20 outcome document.

Meeting calendars and travel schedules now converge to propel the SDG process. For those involved in UN-led development work, this process may appear to be a way to the future we want. As Ross Coggins wrote in his 1976 poem The Development Set: “Our thoughts are deep and our vision global.” New wisdom will no doubt emerge and be shared with everyone that keeps a Twitter account.

But experience also tells us that political aspiration processes may not necessarily lead to clarity. Our current set of global development indicators come out of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In total, sixty indicators on very important topics have been identified, ranging from infant mortality rate, to CO2 emissions, to condom use during high-risk sex. Forests are in there too, with the indicator “proportion of land area covered by forests”.

While MDG indicator reports have made us more aware and better informed about development issues, it remains difficult to deduce from this complex set what we mean by progress, and more importantly how we measure such progress.

I argue for keeping it simple. If we want sustainability to be broadly understood and desired, we should avoid complexity. And note that complexity does not necessarily mean sophisticated. It can also mean the excessive use of details. Some say that the devil is in the details, but perhaps it is the other way around: the details are the devil.

In other words, we need ways to describe sustainable development wherever we are, and at different scales. And it needs to be easy to understand and affordable to measure. Not least for those investing in businesses that need to be both profitable and sustainable.

Sustainable development has three dimensions – economic, social and environmental. The Rio+20 process did a good job of reconfirming the concept, which dates back to the Brundtland Commission in 1987 and the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.

So, why not go back to this agreed base? It seems to me that four measures could be enough to say if we are going in the sustainability direction:

1. The economic dimension of sustainable development will always have to do with a steady growth of income. Economists will argue which type of income would be appropriate to use, but the measure would be made in monetary terms, i.e. Δ$.

2. The social dimension has to do with a very wide range of issues from rights to health to education. A general measure could, however, be about how the priorities and actions in these areas are determined. In that sense, a steady increase of the number of people involved in decision-making could be a useful measure, i.e. Δn.

The environmental dimension is even more complex, so I suggest two general measures that will tell us about direct impact on the environment and also about resilience of nature and humanity.

3. First, a steady recovery of biomass in landscapes could have several positive impacts, i.e. ΔtC (tonnes of Carbon).

4. Secondly, a steadily reduced use of fossil fuels by produced output will be desirable, i.e. ΔJ/$ (Joule/USD, or energy efficiency).

If all four of these measures show long-term positive trends, or are maintained at satisfactory levels, then I believe we can safely say that we have sustainable development:

SD = Δ$ + Δn + ΔtC – ΔJ/$

Of course, believing is not enough. I look forward to a scientific evidence base that informs us how sustainable development can be effectively measured.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to follow the formal process of establishing SDGs.

Neil Palmer/CIAT

BOGOR, Indonesia (11 December, 2012)_The UNFCCC COP-18 in Doha worked overtime to finally agree not to disagree. The Secretariat was quick to make a release that declares success and highlights four results:

1. Amendment of the Kyoto Protocol;
2. Timetable for negotiating a 2015 agreement;
3. Decisions on new UNFCCC institutions, including the Green Climate Fund;
4. Reiterating the ambition for $100 billion per year of climate finance by 2020, and acknowledging a total of $6 billion in pledges for the next years, exclusively from European countries.

There is no lack of commentaries to the COP18 results, and most of them paint a very different picture. Perhaps most strikingly, some major media (here and here) highlight the principle on “losses and damages” as the most significant result, not mentioned in the process-oriented UNFCCC release. For the first time a responsibility of rich countries to compensate poorer ones for the effects of climate change has been established. Seems to me that new channels for climate finance and support to adaptation and humanitarian crises can then be unleashed, away from more bureaucratic and slow-moving ideas pursued in the negotiations.

Comments from environmental NGOs (here, here, here and here), focus on the lack of commitment by developed countries in the negotiations, as well as in providing finance. The Kyoto Protocol is considered watered down, as the countries staying in represent as little as 15% of emissions. While these points are pertinent, I also observe that they are mainly about the UNFCCC process and its internal workings, which is of course understandable on the final day of negotiations. But at the annual high point of attention on climate change, there is a risk that the bigger picture is lost in process technicalities.

What also strikes me is the historically low profile of forestry and agriculture (the green sectors), both in the results and in the commentaries. The UNFCCC release makes a strange singular note that “Governments have further clarified ways to measure deforestation, and to ensure that efforts to fight deforestation are supported”. Besides reducing REDD+ to be only about deforestation, this official press release makes no mention of important progress on multiple benefits and drivers. True, a stalemate in the talks on verification meant that REDD+ did not make expected progress this time, and therefore apparently falls off the radar for communicators. For agriculture, Doha was even worse as the topic fell off the radar altogether, in the shadow of struggles to keep the main tracks of the negotiation process alive.

The straw to clutch is the planned 2015 climate agreement. This is the next opportunity to rearrange how the convention deals with real-world issues. We have a few years to provide new thinking, research and analyses from the side of the green sectors, to show how these fit into the climate change challenge and what solutions may look like.

Let me start right away with some thoughts:

The Green Climate Fund comes with a lot of expectations. The ambitious $100 billion per year by 2020 would indeed be a larger-than-normal budget to get things done in the countries that need it most. But consider that the World GDP now stands at $70 trillion per year. So we are talking about 1/700 of the world economy, or, actually, about 1/1000 as the 100 billion seems nominally and politically fixed, while GDP will likely continue to grow in the years to 2020. The increase of GDP has been on average 2.5 trillion per year since UNFCCC started its negotiations twenty years ago, i.e. 25 times the anticipated climate fund. On one hand, one hundred billion per year to deal with climate change then sounds like a bargain. But, on the other, can we seriously believe that these funds, should they materialise, will change the world in the way the UNFCCC process sets out?

Let us now look at the green sectors. A recent FAO report states that investments in agriculture in some 76 low and middle income countries is about $200 billion per year, dominated by private capital. The global investment in agriculture is at $5 trillion per year, and the trade in forest, agriculture and food products is worth around $2.5 trillion per year. So, what influence can we expect climate finance to have on the sectors that account for up to a third of our emissions, provide livelihoods for several billion rural people, are subject to important food security policies, and at the same time are the most affected by climate change?

Not much, given the lack progress in Doha, and the lack of attention to the green sectors.

There seems to be a case to rethink.

The green sectors have an 8000-year history of providing food and provisions for our civilization, while dealing with climate and climate change hazards. The climate challenge is arguably bigger than ever, and definitely requires more haste. But isolating the climate challenge within the green sectors is not possible. Climate change is an integrated part of these sectors that deals also with other challenges of our future. Forestry and agriculture are therefore not part of the solution – they are the solution.

So perhaps we should flip the coin and include climate change action in the normal business of the green sectors, rather than the other way around? Perhaps this will be more effective in meeting UNFCCC’s objectives than to wait for environment-driven negotiations to provide solutions? After all, the green sectors with their billons of dependents are the main stakeholders when it comes to climate change, so the incentive should be there.

Action from the green sectors perspective, on all scales and in the face of climate change, to secure and develop livelihoods, natural resources, low-carbon growth and food production seems like a smart approach – possibly even profitable. We can call this a landscape approach.

Some interesting discussions in this direction have happened in the margins of COP-18. A paper by Tony La Viña et al. suggests that the separate efforts on REDD+, agriculture and land use change could be combined, going towards a 2015 agreement. The Forest and Agriculture Days have agreed to come together into a Landscape Day as the issues are inherently cross sectorial. Similar discussions were heard in side events, and have been discussed on CIFOR’s blog (here, here and here).

So these are also exciting times! Building on the agreements, knowledge, ambitions and experiences in REDD+, including voluntary initiatives, and working with stakeholders across the green sectors could lead towards a new platform for 2015. Developing an understanding of a landscape approach will be central in this effort.

Maintaining the role of each of the green sectors as engines for green growth, mitigation and adaptation is critical, as is an open dialogue within the UNFCCC. But more than anything, we depend on partnerships where we are prepared to cross old boundaries.

For more stories from the UN climate talks in Doha, click here.

This blog entry addresses the latter question and suggests an analytical rather than administrative approach to landscapes. It also suggests that working at a landscape level does not challenge the traditional sectors, but rather helps combine their efforts to achieve an overall better result.

‘Landscape’ certainly has a different meaning to different constituencies. Ecologists talk about landscape ecology (Turner 1989), geographers focus on land forms, land use planners work with polygons and buffer zones, hydrologists consider the catchment, there is a convention on landscapes, and—as perhaps the most appreciated group—landscape painters view the world through an artistic lens. Fundamentally, a landscape is simply a ‘spatially heterogeneous area’ that can be large or small in size. It then depends on the perspectives and objectives we apply to the landscape.

Let’s assume that the application we want is sustainable development, and that we therefore need to talk about ‘landscapes for sustainable development’. As generally agreed, sustainable development has social, environmental and economic dimensions. We must consider how landscapes can contribute to all these dimensions, and how landscapes are impacted by such development. Basics in landscape approaches tell us that these benefits and impacts come from different sectors (forestry, agriculture, etc.), and also that these sectors strongly influence each other. Further, the benefits and impacts are not limited to the physical landscape; they may also accrue to people and environments far away. So we are looking for solutions in multi-scale, multi-stakeholder, multi-sector landscapes. Doesn’t this sound awfully complicated? Shouldn’t we stick to our well-known sectors and deal with them one by one in an orderly fashion?

The problem is that we will not find the better solutions this way. Boundaries between sectors and in the landscape will obstruct us. Removing boundaries and taking on the more complex analysis will help us better meet the overall multiple goals (see Holmgren and Thuresson 1997).

To stimulate discussion, I suggest a simplified analytical framework with two desired dimensions. The first is ‘development’: we want economic growth, better equity, improved health and appropriate nutrition, and we want these over both the short and long term. The second is ‘resilience’: we want environmental conservation, low climate impact, maintained land productivity and managed livelihood risks. These dimensions encapsulate, in my view, the sustainable development aspiration. And, as an added advantage, it is easier to illustrate two dimensions rather than three (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Simplified framework for analysing landscapes in the context of sustainable development, and how selected land uses may contribute.

Figure 1 also illustrates some applications of natural resources management in the landscape. Environmental conservation provides high resilience but low development. Conversely, crop and tree monocultures can give us high development but with lower resilience. At the landscape level we can, if we are smart enough, combine these and other approaches and achieve high development and high resilience at the same time.

While that may sound fine in a simplified way, there are some potential pitfalls. Approaching landscapes through an analytical framework is abstract and complex. Wherever our expertise lies, we may end up outside our comfort zones and there can be a strong urge to apply traditional thinking. The following descriptions are to help resist that urge:

Pitfall 1 is to assume that the landscape as a whole needs to be administered and planned. As a consequence, it is assumed that a landscape needs governance structures and policies that provide carrots and sticks. Because if we don’t have these arrangements, how can we control what is happening in the landscape? But as soon as the landscape is turned into an administrative unit with a boundary, rules and regulations, we are likely to lose the dynamic analysis leading to new solutions. By emulating power structures, the landscape instead becomes an object that is subject to interventions, negotiations and regulations. Analysis of landscape solutions must instead lead to improved governance and policies at the individual sector level, as these are the building blocks of policies. We should not confuse sector policies and landscape approaches.

Pitfall 2 is that we sometimes view the landscape primarily from a biophysical perspective and take an engineering approach to find the optimal combination of land uses. Many times, institutional history in the fields of agriculture and forestry makes us focus on the tangible and manageable properties in the landscape. It can be about biodiversity, soil fertility, hydrology, carbon storage, climate regulation, agricultural productivity, infrastructure or forest management schemes. These are all important topics, but we also need to focus on socio-economics, culture, gender, democracy and power structures, finance and banking, institutions, private sector, migration, nutrition, education and health—in short, the ‘people’ aspects. Without a holistic perspective, landscape analysis will not be meaningful.

Pitfall 3 is to limit the landscape approaches to the ‘commons’. There are a lot of initiatives and literature that deal with the very important issue of governing common resources (Ostrom 1990), and it is often addressed at a landscape level. Particularly when it comes to forests, it is often assumed that we are primarily dealing with common, or at least public sector-controlled, resources (which is not quite true). However, taking a commons-only approach would severely limit the landscape analysis. Instead, including and facilitating responsible entrepreneurship and private sector ventures is an essential part of the approach. Billions of people are the custodians of the world’s natural resources, and they are all making a living as ‘landscape entrepreneurs’. Agribusinesses and forest industry play a major role and must be considered in the equation. The decisions of all these stakeholders are what will shape how landscapes contribute to sustainable development.

As a conclusion, landscapes for sustainable development should be approached analytically and holistically, and should primarily be subjects for dialogue towards improved policies that could be applied within a range of sectors. We should not try to apply administration or planning to landscapes as such, as we may end up in the same fragmented situation we wanted to avoid in the first place. What we want is wise management of natural resources that lead to development and resilience. Analysing how this can be achieved, and how to inform policy-making, appears to be a very appropriate use of time and resources for agriculture and forestry institutions.

In an earlier blog entry, I discussed how the annual global deforestation area is determined and the fact that this number has been used as a universal indicator of how the world’s forests are faring. I also promised to return to this topic, with a new way of illustrating forests and forestry. Instead of a deforestation clock, CIFOR is now introducing a World Forests Clock on its homepage, counting five key flows instead of a single number. With this new clock we are proposing a more comprehensive perspective on forests and forestry to stimulate thought and dialogue.

Over the past decades, lots of work has been done to define how forests and forestry should be monitored. However, these expert communities have worked somewhat away from mainstream and popular communication on forests. International processes on criteria for sustainable forest management have come up with, literally, hundreds of indicators, many of which are difficult to assess or even understand. National reports on the state of forests have taken similar approaches and painted a comprehensive picture, but one that is also complex and inaccessible. FAO’s FRA 2005 report banked on these processes and illustrated trends for 20 or so key variables with reasonable data coverage. Following Rio+20, we are now entering a new political process to determine ‘sustainable development goals’ and there is already speculation over which indicators we should use – a decision that is likely to be determined through political negotiations rather than science.

So what indications of forests and forestry should be communicated if we want to provide a representative and understandable picture? Clearly, a small number of parameters is needed to communicate well to a broader audience. The highly complex sets of intergovernmental development indicators don’t do the job. On the other hand, using deforestation as the one and only simplifies too much and gives an incomplete picture. Between these extremes, we have made a shortlist for clocking the world’s forests and forestry. Five clocks, like the row of clocks behind hotel reception desks showing the time in different zones, here illustrate what is happening globally with our forests and forestry.

Note that this is not a complete set of indicators. It is a set of measurements for which data happen to be available. They do present some food for thought and an illustration of what is happening to the world’s forests, and how forests and forestry can contribute to a sustainable future. It is also important to note that each clock can be perceived as a positive or a negative indication of progress, depending on the user’s development perspective and political views.

Clock 1: Deforestation. This remains a key measure on the shortlist. It is well known and it illustrates a global issue that is high on the political agenda. It leads to questions of land use planning and landscape management, and what the overall return for new agricultural land might be. It is a focus of the REDD+ process. For the moment, the best data we have say that global deforestation is -13 Mha/year, which corresponds to -0.41 ha/s (See my earlier blog entry on CIFOR’s previous ‘World Deforestation Clock’).

Clock 2: Forest planting. Planted forests account for only 7% of all forests but they are key to sustainable landscapes and sustainable provision of bio-based products (notably fibre and energy), as well as provision of ecosystem services (notably watershed protection). There is an important debate on how planted forests are to be established and managed, including questions about monocultures of exotics in the tropics and their implications for local people. At the same time it is through planted forests that we produce as much as two-thirds of industrial wood, and it is likely that this proportion will continue to increase. Substantial investments are made in planted forests, with a global area increase of about 3.4 Mha/year or 0.11 ha/s (see Carle and Holmgren 2008).

Clock 3: Renewable energy. Biomass provides an important chunk of our overall energy supply, in the range of 10% of all energy consumed, and it is all renewable (see the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2010). A very high proportion of this biomass comes from forests and trees, including traditional wood energy (which remains essential in all regions and for billions of people), residuals and waste from forest industries, and second-generation biofuels. We present the overall rate of energy from biomass, recognizing that some is provided from the wider landscape and also in the form of waste. Bioenergy power supplies about 1.62 TW, equivalent to 0.45 GWh/s, or almost 5 times the combined nuclear power potential in the world.

Clock 4: Carbon sequestration. Contrary to the high-profile picture of forest area loss, the world’s forests continue to be a considerable net sink of atmospheric carbon. IPCC already reported this in its 4th assessment report. A recent paper by Pan et al. confirms this and concludes that the rate of carbon sequestration in forests is 2.4 Pg CO₂ eq/year, corresponding to 76 tonnes/s – a rate equal to about 5% of current overall anthropogenic emissions. If we deduct the emissions from forest losses through land use change, the picture is less rosy, but still the overall forest carbon stock is increasing by about 1.1 Pg CO₂ eq/year.

Clock 5: Value of forest products trade. A world with green growth makes good use of sustainable forest products. One measure of the importance of forest products is provided by FAO’s annual trade statistics (2010 edition). While these statistics only include wood products, and not the increasingly valuable trade in non-timber forest products, these are the best publicly available numbers. The rate of traded forest goods is about US$230 billion/year, or about US$7239/s. This represents a small but significant proportion (about 2%) of global merchandise trade, and about 10% of trade aggregated under agriculture and food in some reports.

I look forward to a debate over the World Forests Clock, including the selection of parameters. If there were reliable gauges, then I would have considered adding clocks for forestry contribution to rural economies, loss of forest-dependent species and perhaps local climate regulation (temperature, water provision, rainfall generation). But we have surprisingly few generally agreed measurements of these things – perhaps this can serve as stimulation for future research?

Forest Day 6. Eko Prianto.

On 2 December 2012, I shall have the honour of opening the sixth edition of Forest Day at the 18th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP18) in Doha. This will undoubtedly be another inspiring and well-attended event on the fate of forests and the future of forestry. Forest Day has been organised annually by CIFOR and the Collaborative Partnership on Forests since COP13 in Bali in 2007, coinciding with the highest attention to forests that the world has ever seen. Never before have so many heads of state engaged in forests and such generous international contributions been made to this end. I believe we can safely say that the attention to forests has been permanently raised over the past half-decade. We can be proud that Forest Day and all contributing partners have played a significant role in this.

Forest Day 6 will, however, be the last one that is organised during the UNFCCC COP. The mission to put forests on the climate change agenda is arguably completed. The mission to deliver sustainable, climate-smart and equitable growth in the green sectors has barely started. To succeed, we need holistic approaches and we need to tear down sector boundaries that obscure our view and limit the set of solutions. We are therefore looking forward to building on the Forest Day experience, joining forces with a wider range of partners in agriculture and rural development, and holding a Landscape Day at the UNFCCC COP next year.

This is not an easy step to take. Since the first Forest Day, more than 5,000 forest stakeholders from more than 100 countries have attended the event. This includes nearly 1,000 UNFCCC negotiators and more than 400 journalists. The more than 300 speakers have included a president, ministers, Nobel Laureates, indigenous leaders and global experts and scientists. More than 100,000 others have participated online. Surveys have shown that over 90% of participants thought Forest Day was ‘successful’ or ‘very successful’. Clearly, Forest Day has become one of the defining events on forests and forestry on the international scene. So, why change a winning concept?

There are at least two good reasons that I would like to highlight.

First, the climate change negotiations are moving on. Past years have led to successful agreements on REDD+, albeit in a context of much less successful results at higher levels. Step by step, the various pieces of REDD+ are being defined and agreed. A reasonable expectation in Doha this year is that texts on national forest monitoring systems and measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) will be concluded, and that issues on drivers will move forward. Discussions on how to include multiple benefits in the equation are interesting and point to the context in which REDD+ needs to be implemented. As REDD+ proceeds and focuses more on implementation, we see a diminishing demand for a high-level event that focuses on forests per se, and an increasing demand for contributing in other ways, in particular through relevant and focused research.

Second, the next big thing on the UNFCCC horizon is the new climate agreement to be put in place by 2015. For this process we believe it is key to, again, raise the importance of the green sectors and make sure that they are well attended to in the UNFCCC workplan. We have seen the struggle to bring agriculture into the negotiations over past years, with quite meagre results, possibly because the debate has been dominated by environmental perspectives on natural resources. The Convention should consider the management and economics of natural resources more seriously, not only because they contribute a very high proportion of emissions, but also because the green sectors and long-term food security will be the most affected by climate change and because agriculture and forestry remain key for the livelihood of billions of people. We believe that a landscape platform can help the Convention focus more on these issues.

I have said earlier that it is time for forestry to come out of the forest. Moving on from Forest Day to a Landscape Day is an excellent example of what needs to happen. There are no sharp boundaries between forests and the wider landscape. Not geographically, not economically, and not for sustainable development.

Let me finish with an acknowledgement of all those that have worked hard to make Forest Day a success over the past years. We will no doubt have an opportunity to celebrate in Doha next week and discuss the next phase, with landscapes as the focus for the benefit of UNFCCC, but also look at how we can continue to develop the Forest Day concept in other forums.