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Forestry

Certified Forestry Is In Trouble, U.N. Report Says

The certified-forestry movement is running out of steam, a United Nations report suggests.

"The pace of expansion of global certified forest area has slowed dramatically in the last three years," says the international agency's recently released Forest Products Annual Market Review, 2008-2009. The proportion of "industrial roundwood" coming from forests certified by such environmental organizations as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has actually decreased recently, to 25.9%, it says.

"Certified forest area increased by around 50 million hectares a year between 2001 and 2005 – mainly due to a rapid increase in certified forest area in North America – then the rate slowed by half to 25 million hectares a year in 2006 and 2007. More recently the rate has stagnated even further, not exceeding 4 million hectares between May 2008 and May 2009." Certified forestry has actually lost some ground in North America and Europe, the U.N. report adds.

One culprit is that the sustainable-forestry movement is running out of low-hanging fruit: "Now that many of the largest state- and industry-owned lands in the developed world are already
certified, the certification movement faces the significant challenge of expanding in more difficult
areas" such as small forestry operations and developing countries.

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Over 10,000 jobs already lost in Finnish forestry sector

Finnish forestry’s contribution to the national economy has dropped by half since the start of the new millennium.

International Paper Treads Monsanto’s Path to ‘Frankenforests’

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- International Paper Co., the world’s largest pulp and paper maker, plans to remake commercial forests in the same way Monsanto Co. revolutionized farms with genetically modified crops.

Farmers protect climate by doing Forestry

Austrian Farmers have taken care of both - Farmland and Forests - since centuries because of the close interconnection of agriculture and forestry. Holistic land use management is obligatory for every Austrian farmer. Therefore it's not quite new for Austrian Farmers what the World Agroforestry Centre is concluding:

A New Direction And Vision For America’s Forests

SEATTLE, August 14, 2009 - US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has outlined his vision for the future of America’s forests. In his first major speech regarding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, Vilsack set forth a new direction for conservation, management, and restoration of these natural treasures.

Germany and US to finance a Reforestation Project in India

The United States and Germany have agreed to donate $19 million for the reforestation of a Bangladesh wildlife sanctuary under a global climate change mitigation project, the U.S. embassy said on Wednesday.

Kenya to Plant 7.6 Billion Trees to Check Deforestation

NAIROBI - Kenya said on Wednesday it would plant 7.6 billion trees over the next 20 years to redress decades of chopping down forest cover, the effect of which is now being felt in acute water and power shortages.

Higher Carbon Dioxide May Give Pine Trees A Competitive Edge

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2009) — Pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide than today's levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions, a Duke University-led research team reported Aug. 3 at a national ecology conference.

Indonesian Government: Production forests will reach 10m hectares by 2014

The government is optimistic its production forests (HTI) will span over 5 million hectares by the year-end, and over 10 million hectares by 2014 as targeted, because the forestry industry can now resort to financing supported by government, an official says.

Issue date: 
May 18, 2009

A profitable rainforest!(?)

A MOST unusual document landed on your correspondent’s desk recently: a financial report from a rainforest. Iwokrama, a 370,000-hectare rainforest in central Guyana, announced that it was in profit. It added, more intriguingly, that rainforests had entered the “global economy”.

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by Dr. Radut