Criteria & Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management

Criteria & Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management (C&I) are policy instruments by which sustainability of forest management in the country/region, or progress towards Sustainable forest management (SFM), may be evaluated and reported on. C&I is a conjunctive term for a set of objectives and the variables/descriptions allowing to evaluate whether the objectives are achieved or not.

There are many various sets of C&I in the world that are used by particular regional SFM processes (e.g. FOREST EUROPE, Montreal Process), international organisations and their activities (e.g. FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment) or certification of forest management and forest products (e.g. Forest Stewardship Council, Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification). Signatory countries of particular processes or certification schemes can develop their national sets derived from the set of process/scheme.

Criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management:

Criteria and indicators are applied at different levels:

The first FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment was published in 1948. It comprised five indicators, however, their main focus was to assess the availability of timber, not sustainability of forest management as a whole.

The history of the idea of C&I of SFM goes back to 1992 when the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development adopted the “Forest Principles”* and Chapter 11 of Agenda 21. At about the same time, the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) did some pioneering work on “Criteria for the Measurement of Sustainable Tropical Forest Management.” Following this summit, the concept of “criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management” gained increasing international attention.

The first set of Pan-European C&I, based on documents adopted by two Expert Level Follow-Up Meetings of the Helsinki Conference, was adopted by the third Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe on 2–4 June 1998 in Lisbon/Portugal as an Annex 1 of the Resolution L2. This set consisted of 6 Criteria of SFM, 20 quantitative indicators and 80 descriptive indicators (4 per each quantitative indicator).

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