Secondary forests comprise a large and growing proportion of the forest cover in the tropics and are very important at the local, national and regional levels for a wide range of products and environmental services. However, knowledge and expertise regarding secondary forests is still limited, and they are inadequately addressed in forest policy, planning and research.

Many modelers and spatial analysts engaged in the Mekong, Ganges, Andes, Volta, Limpopo and Nile basins are grappling with similar issues:

How do we get hold of and share quality information?

How do we integrate bio-physical and socio-economic data?

What are the best methods to fill data gaps and move across scales?

How do we select the most appropriate models from the plethora available and transfer these tools and technologies to partners with limited means?

How do we link different models and build feed-back loops...?

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol raised the hopes of many, that payment for carbon sequestration services would provide a significant incentive for sustainable management practices in industrial forestry in tropical countries. Data to assess how realistic these hopes are, remain scant and high degree of uncertainty about CDM rules make assessment hazardous. The analysis in this paper focuses on the potential for using carbon trading to stimulate adoption of reduced impact logging (RIL)-based sustainable forest management.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 1 methodologies commonly underpin project-scale carbon accounting for changes in land use and management and are used in frameworks for Life Cycle Assessment and carbon footprinting of food and energy crops. These methodologies were intended for use at large spatial scales. This can introduce error in predictions at finer spatial scales. There is an urgent need for development and implementation of higher tier methodologies that can be applied at fine spatial scales (e.g.

This paper provides the general objectives of the special issue: secondary forests in Asia: their diversity, importance and role in future environmental management. It provides a brief overview of the renewed attention to tropical secondary forests and sketches the history of research on this subject.