This report explores criteria and indicators (C&I) for monitoring and assessing the sustainability of community managed forests (CMFs), and offers some insights into methodological tools and conceptual approaches for C&I development. The research was intended to explore the potential value of C&I to forest communities, their partners and their representative organisations to legitimise and enhance management, including strengthening of control over forest resources and facilitating the equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of forest management.

The Melamchi Water Supply Project (MWSP) is designed to minimize the shortage of drinking water in the Kathmandu valley. Although the project was supposed to be completed by 2008, due to various problems, it is still diffi cult to forecast the exact date of completion. This paper quantifi es the downstream effects of diverting water from the Melamchi (Stage-I),Yangri (Stage-II) and Larke (Stage-III) rivers under current as well as future climate scenarios. The Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used in the analysis.

This book for the first time brings together a suite of effective methods as a guidance on how to deal with the needs of local communities and biodiversity in landscapes required by decision makers. The techniques provide conventional biophysical descriptions of the landscape and explicitly relate this information to local needs, preferences and value systems. These methods can be used to guide future research and to make recommendations on options about land use and policy. The methods described in this report also provide a foundation for deeper dialogue with the forest communities.

This document is intended for those interested in gathering natural resource information that reflects the needs of local communities. It describes a multidisciplinary survey developed with indigenous communities in the fores-rich landscapes of the Malinau watershed in East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). The final methods reflect a mixture of judgements, compromises and reactions to trials over many months. It is intended that it is useful to readers from diverse backgrounds given the multidisciplinary nature of the procedures described. This is not intended as a manual.

Fires are considered a potential threat to sustainable development for their direct impacts on ecosystems, their contribution to carbon emissions, and impacts on biodiversity. In 1997/98, Indonesia had the most severe fires worldwide, and smoke haze pollution recurs yearly. The fire-related policy problems are defined as smoke haze pollution, forest degradation and deforestation, and impacts on the rural sector. Some of the apparent major causes of the problems are identified. The estimate of area affected by fires in 1997/98 is revised from 9.7 million hectares to 11.7 million hectares.

The BAG focuses on the social criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, a topic that has been the subject of considerable controversy and uncertainty. It is designed for people interested in assessing sustainable forest management, but who do not have a high degree of expertise in social sciences. This manual describes six simple methods designed for use by biophysical scientists with a college education. These methods can also be used by assessors with higher levels of expertise in social sciences, but they are presented in a 'cookbook' format.

This is designed to supplement 'the BAG' and 'the Grab Bag'. It provides a scoring method that can be used with the two manuals, to come to a decision about particular criteria and indicators in particular forest and human settings. Following the section on scoring is a section on analysis. It begins very simply, leading the user through the steps of making a spreadsheet, and concluding with more complex statistical analyses that may be desirable in some circumstances. Different teams have different requirements for quantitative and statistical sophistication in their analyses.

This is designed to supplement 'the BAG' and 'the Grab Bag'. It provides a scoring method that can be used with the two manuals, to come to a decision about particular criteria and indicators in particular forest and human settings. Following the section on scoring is a section on analysis. It begins very simply, leading the user through the steps of making a spreadsheet, and concluding with more complex statistical analyses that may be desirable in some circumstances. Different teams have different requirements for quantitative and statistical sophistication in their analyses.

Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) is a decision-making tool developed for complex problems. In a situation where multiple criteria are involved confusion can arise if a logical, well-structured decision-making process is not followed. Another difficulty in decision making is that reaching a general consensus in a multidisciplinary team can be very difficult to achieve. By using MCA the members don't have to agree on the relative importance of the Criteria or the rankings of the alternatives.

This manual provides methods for the development and evaluation of criteria and indicators (C&I) which can then be used to assess the sustainability of forest management. The manual is written primarily for researchers, people or groups interested in evaluating C&I for assessments of forests in new areas, or as a reference for readers wanting to know how CIFOR’s Generic Template was produced. The methods presented are aimed at the development of sets of C&I for natural forest at the forest management unit (FMU) level, especially in the tropics.