Forest Tenure

Claims of sustainability are virtually impossible to prove but enough is known about tropical forest ecology and silviculture to protect ecosystem functions and maintain biodiversity while still deriving financial profits from logging. Rapid improvements in long-term forest production will derive from better planning of harvesting operations and stand improvement treatments.

India is vast, diverse and complex, in its environments and in environment-society relations. These relationships, and government policies which influence or control them, are the subject of very significant reforms currently occurring in India.

The impact of human endeavours on the environment in the struggle to eke out a living through crop and animal agriculture is examined in a holistic context. Analyses focus on all the sources of pressure that modify the vegetation cover of rural Africa, including the effects of fires and burning of biomass, fuel wood extraction and deforestation and land clearing.

This concept paper addresses those elements in the people-forest interface which we perceive as critical to sustainable forest management, based on our own training and experience, as well as two field tests of the conceptual framework (in Kalimantan and Côte d'Ivoire ).