Community Forestry (CF) initiatives took place in Myanmar after a series of forest policy reforms and decentralisation arrangements during the 1990s. The Forest Department has been instrumental in the introduction of CF in degraded areas with primary objectives of afforestation and meeting the local consumption of forest products. Despite the policy reforms and initiatives by the Forest Department, the Myanmar CF program suffers from serious setbacks due to a lack of social skills and professional attitude among local forest staff, the uncertainty of land tenure policy and lack of a community empowerment approach. A local empowerment approach supplemented with transparent and accountable land tenure and a viable common property regime is recommended to overcome the growing constraints. The empowerment approach should emphasise promoting a local voice and representation within the local socio-economic context, developing local networks towards federalised institution, and honouring local decisions.

The institutions created to address the problems associated with forest utilisation, degradation and destruction internationally have ranged from hard laws, put in place by governments through legislation, to soft law mechanisms such as forest certification. Each of these standards requires enforcement and evaluation through monitoring and information reporting. Despite differing levels of legalisation, the monitoring and information reporting requirements documented in hard and soft law mechanisms can reveal considerable crossover. It is therefore important to identify where hard laws are adequate for individual SFM situations and where soft laws are performing better, with a view to identifying overlaps that affect the efficiency, cost effectiveness and level of confidence in the monitoring process. This paper presents a basic theoretical background to SFM and discusses two important characteristics, namely adaptive management and monitoring. The hard and soft law mechanisms available to forest policy makers are addressed and, finally, the role of stakeholders and the wider operating environment in forestry-related monitoring is considered.

The number of initiatives aimed at the evaluation of Sustainable Forest Management has risen considerably since the UNCED Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In a large number of countries and regions standards with Principles, Criteria and Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) have been developed. In many cases, this development took place within the framework of an intergovernmental or international initiative. Sometimes the initiative was taken by national or local organisations. Standards were often developed for the purpose of forest certification. In this research, 164 standards for SFM were collected worldwide and compared using multivariate statistics. The comparison was carried out using a reference standard specially designed for this purpose. It is a generic tool that can be used for any comparative study between the contents of standards. Although a number of typical sustainability elements are present in most standards, differences between standards are substantial. The main cause of variation between standards is the difference between levels of application. Standards developed for the National level are less detailed and contain many elements concerning monitoring aspects to be evaluated at sub-national scale. The more detailed standards for assessment at the Forest Management Unit (FMU) level combine monitoring aspects with a large number of management aspects. These different conditions between FMU and National/Sub-National Level and, therefore, the need for level-specific Criteria and Indicators are well known and accepted by the forestry profession.

A second and less known cause of variation between standards is the difference in geographical origin. The observed geographical differences between standards can be explained by biophysical and socio-economic differences between countries and regions. Standards from developing countries in the South most often emphasise the social and economic aspects of sustainability, while they give little attention to the need for research-based information. Standards from industrialised countries in the North on the other hand, strongly emphasise the ecological forest functions and the need for research-based information. Harmonisation among standards is only recommended as far as differences are caused by a lack of capacity or by socio-economic inequity. These deficiencies should be eliminated through international cooperation in order to obtain a more harmonised standard of SFM throughout the world.

The Sundarbans is a unique mangrove ecosystem of considerable ecological and economic value. The Sundarbans has supplied products and services to mankind for centuries and has been under systematic management for more than 100 years. The forest is now showing signs of degradation. Forest cover, species diversity and ecosystem function have declined, even though several forest policies, laws and management plans have been enacted to protect the forest. The effectiveness of these policies and plans is limited by the poor implementation capacity. Management inadequacies and alternatives that may help to conserve the Sundarbans are discussed.

This paper reviews the evolution of forest policies and forestry institutions in Nepal and tracks the accompanying trends of change in the country's forest cover over the last century. Our objective is to provide an essential foundation to the policy reform process that is underway in Nepal and many other Asian countries. The review shows that before 1957 the Nepalese government's focus was on conversion of forestlands to farmlands, and extraction of timber for export. After the nationalisation of the forests in 1957 until 1976, policy-making efforts were oriented towards national control of forests through stringent laws and expansion of the forest bureaucracy. This approach failed as evidenced by widespread deforestation and forest degradation across the country during the 1960s through 1980s. Early efforts of the government and donor agencies to rectify the problem through reforestation and afforestation also largely failed, but these efforts paved the way for subsequent initiation of the participatory approach to forest management in the late 1970s. Since then, community-based forest management evolved continuously under the aegis of supportive forest policies and legislations. The present community forestry program has met with notable successes in some areas. However, the program has been confronted with some contentious issues in recent years including a policy debate over the suitability of forests in the southern lowlands (the terai) for community management and sharing of income obtained from community forests. These and some other issues surrounding the community forestry program are discussed and their implications for designing or improving future forest governance have been identified.

This paper examines the responsive capacity of the forest foods through domestication and commercialisation for resource-poor vulnerable and affected rural families to the negative socioeconomic impacts and livelihood threats from the HIV / AIDS pandemic. It elaborates the role of local food-based approaches in a context where the goals are the immediate as well as of long-term maintenance, resistance and resilience of rural people to the disease while meeting their food security needs, maintaining their natural resources base, and the long-term conservation of indigenous fruit and vegetable species in particular and biodiversity in general. From investigation the figures indicate that wild foods may be cheap, nutritious, economically beneficial and their production less labour-intensive. Moreover, wild foods may constitute an alternative to food shortages and incomes problems caused by HIV / AIDS if existing added value technologies are improved and appropriate ones developed and made available to farmers for use at low cost.

In the dry deciduous forests of central India, NTFPs are the major source of livelihood and income generation to local people. In the study area, due to the extremely dry climate and the erratic nature of rainfall, only about 20% of people undertake rainfed agriculture with the result that forests are under tremendous pressure from cattle grazing and fire. Unsustainable harvesting and collection of NTFPs has reduced their availability in the natural forest, which is threatening the livelihood of the tribal collectors. This paper is an outcome of three years of action research implemented with the local community at Sheopur District of Madhya Pradesh. Community awareness generation, science and technology application for NTFP processing and value addition and capacity building were the key approaches for rural livelihood and income generation. The case study emphasises the activities required for sustainable NTFP management.

A brief assessment is presented highlighting the recent experiences, as well as identifying constraints and prospects, on the integration of non-timber forest resources (NTFR) into larger forest inventories (mostly for timber), with emphasis from tropical regions, and from regional to local levels. Although several experiences have been implemented, further documentation is needed on the degree of compatibility of timber management with respect to the extraction of NTFR. One of the main constraints to integration involves the actual costs of undertaking assessments for specific NTFR and the lack of trained personnel who usually have a focus on timber inventories. To overcome this barrier, cross-disciplinary information exchange may be needed in order to make assessments cost-effective and stimulate further work on developing assessment methods for particular NTFR within the framework of larger forest inventories.

From its inception, forest certification aimed to address social as well as environmental goals. The FSC, its certifiers, and supporting donors aggressively supported community certification. As of 2003, 50 communities worldwide have received forest management certificates or chain of custody certification, and many other forest communities have been brought into the decision-making process of the certification of public and private forests as stakeholders. A rich set of lessons can be learned from their experiences that can help guide all certification schemes with an interest in community forest management. In essence, certification has benefited communities in many ways. Yet high costs, standard procedures and requirements as well as policy and regulatory constraints have precluded a large number of communities from beginning the process of certification. Going forward, the standards of certification schemes need to be reviewed and the standard-setting dialogue opened to include community clients (either by modifying the rules or creating a dual track). In parallel, alternative models of certifying sustainability should be considered.

Fossils provide clear evidence of forests covering the Arctic and Antarctic throughout most of the past 250 million years. Ancient polar forests experienced the extreme seasonality of high latitude daylength, but flourished in a warm, temperate climate. For the past 50 years, it has been argued that deciduous trees in these ecosystems conserved carbon by avoiding the respiration required to sustain an evergreen leaf canopy during the continuous darkness of a warm winter. However, only recently have experiments been designed to test this argument by measuring the winter carbon balance of ‘living fossil’ trees in a simulated warm polar climate. Results of these experiments show clearly that the carbon cost of annually shedding leaves in deciduous trees greatly exceeds the cost of respiration for an evergreen canopy. Simulations with a mathematical model support this finding for mature forests growing across a wide latitudinal range, ending a century-long debate concerning the adaptive role of leaf habit in extinct polar forests.

Compensation schemes for ecosystems or environmental services focused on poor rural communities can strengthen their livelihoods and improve ecosystem management. Various initiatives in the Americas provide lessons in this regard. Peasant and indigenous communities manage ecosystems to meet subsistence needs, earn income in markets and pursue new alternatives linked to the provision of environmental services. Compensation schemes should support the integration of these various levels and overcoming hurdles in each one. This requires a broad approach to compensation that avoids fixation with direct payments. A landscape perspective becomes important since environmental services are generated through a variety of land uses. Social capital is crucial for effective collective action in heterogeneous landscapes, to foster internal cohesion and positive external linkages. Expanding and defending communities' rights to the resource base is a prerequisite, otherwise compensation schemes can sidestep or disenfranchise communities. Donors and intermediary oganisations should respect community's perspectives and priorities. The State should guarantee the defence and expansion of communities' rights, policies that revalue rural spaces, and rules for compensation schemes that favour communities.

The study was carried out in a dense humid forest of South Cameroon on young and naturally regenerated trees of 24 timber and non-timber trees species. Evidence was obtained that none of the investigated tree species was immune to pest attack. Of the insect pests recorded, 34 were identified as pests for the first time in Cameroon. Attacks were most of the time negligible and in some cases were likely to be due to occasional generalist's insects, especially defoliators for which seasonal effects were noticeable. Tree of less than 2 m in height suffered more damage in disturbed than in undisturbed forest from leaf eating, shoot boring and sap sucking attacks. Wood boring insect attacks were not common on young trees. These preliminary observations provided indications that insect pests may affect the success of sustainable timber production system for natural forests, thus highlighting the need for further investigations.