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Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests Seminar Series

Hilary Term 2011

Please Note: This seminar series has finished. For information on our current seminar series please see our Seminar Series.

The Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests seminars run from 4.15pm at the School of Geography and the Environment and are followed by drinks, unless indicated otherwise below.

All welcome. For further details and to register, please go to http://bookwhen.com/octf - please take a moment to register to give us an indication of numbers.

All welcome. For further details and to register, please go to http://bookwhen.com/octf. Please take a moment to register to give us an indication of numbers.

Abstracts

Fair trade and unfair trade in timber

Dr Berty van Hensbergen's talk is based on the experiences of SSC Forestry Group in establishing the world's first fair traded timber products company based in Curacautin in South Central Chile. The talk will discuss the many problems that the company has faced in bringing a product to the market. These include technical, political and business related problems.

In addition the speaker will discuss his experiences as an expert adviser to both the Ghana Forestry Commission and the Forestry Sector in Ghana in relation to the establishment of the VPA monitoring system which is required by the FLEGT system in order to import tropical timber into the EU.

Dr van Hensbergen is of Dutch origin but grew up in England. He holds a PhD in Applied Biology from Cambridge based on his studies of the ecology of small carnivores in the Spanish Pyrenees. He lived in South Africa for 16 years where he became Professor of Nature Conservation in the Forestry Faculty at Stellenbosch University. He was involved in the development of the South African Guidelines for Environmental and Social Management in Plantation Forestry in 1989. His research focussed on the application of quantitative methods in wildlife management and he served on the council of the Southern African Wildlife Management Association and served a term as President of the South African Statistical Association. He left academia in 1999 but continues to teach on courses on sustainable forest management and forest certification.

Since 2000 he has been Chairman of the SSC Forestry group which provides consulting support in SFM, manages a small teak plantation in El Salvador and the SLIMF group and sawmill in Chile. He has worked as an FSC lead auditor and peer reviewer since 1997, mainly in Africa and Latin America, for both forest management and chain of custody.

Global forest carbon financial risk management best practices

Gabriel Thoumi's talk will be based on a workshop held in Washington, DC in November 2010 which included various project developers, standards, buyers, Standard and Poor's, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The Forest Certification Challenge

Forest certification systems emerged in the 1990's in large part to address the issue of deforestation in the tropics. To date however, less than 10% of certified area is in tropical forests and timber production from these forests makes up less than 1% of the global supply in certified wood. Within this context, what are the prospects for making significant advancements in certifying the sustainable management of tropical forests?

While the Programme for the Endorsement of Certification Systems (PEFC) advances a range of initiatives to support the development of certification systems globally and in tropical countries, it has also recently completed a number of revisions to its International Standards. PEFC's revised Standards include new requirements and address a number of the issues raised by stakeholders in consumer countries during the revision process. At the same time, PEFC has an imperative and motivation to provide an accessible mechanism to promote certification globally. Striking the balance between demand-side requirements and supply-side feasibility is clearly the certification challenge that PEFC strives to meet.

This presentation will provide an update on PEFC, featuring the major changes in the new standards and highlight current approaches and challenges for advancing certification in the tropics.

Sarah Price is currently the Head of Projects and Development at PEFC International in Geneva. Prior to working at PEFC, Sarah held positions with The Forest Trust and The Forests Dialogue. She also has over 10 years of field experience working in the forests of North America, South America and Southeast Asia. Sarah possesses a Masters of Forest Science from Yale University and a Bachelors of Science in Natural Resource Conservation from the University of British Columbia.

Forests, trees and business in supporting developing countries

For centuries foresters have recognized the multiple values of forests and, since the UNCED in 1992, these have become increasingly appreciated by policy makers, the media and the public. Many attempts have been made to quantify and value the various services and products that arise from trees and forests. However, at both international and national levels much of this has been initiated "top-down" with governmental agency or major commercial company involvement. The former have frequently been ineffective and the latter have often provoked criticism of their failure to consider social and environmental attributes adequately. Relatively little attention has been paid to promoting, encouraging and supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries that can effect land use change and enhancement while providing a range of social and environmental benefits through natural forest management, plantation establishment and agroforestry operations. Such enterprises will require some pure and applied research and will need professional managers with corporate and technical management capability in addition to market developers.

Measuring biodiversity conservation effectiveness in Africa's protected areas

Protected areas are the cornerstone of global conservation efforts but their performance in maintaining populations of their key species remains poorly documented. Ian addressed this gap using a new database of 583 population abundance time series for 69 species of large mammals in 78 African protected areas. Population abundance time series were aggregated to form a multi-species index of overall change in population abundance using methods developed for the Living Planet Index. The index reveals a 59% decline in population abundance between 1970 and 2005. Indices for different parts of Africa demonstrate large regional differences, with southern African protected areas typically maintaining their populations and western African protected areas suffering the most severe declines. The causes of these declines are complex but analysis with linear mixed effects models has revealed that larger protected areas have experienced the most severe declines which is partially explained by particularly severe underfunding per unit area of larger PAs. Unexpectedly, it appears that it is the smaller and more common mammals that are experiencing the worst declines.

Ian Craigie has recently completed a PhD carried out jointly with the University of Cambridge, ZSL London and UNEP - World Conservation Monitoring Centre. The PhD focussed on assessing the conservation performance of Africa's protected areas. Prior to the PhD Ian worked for South African National Parks and competed a MSc at Imperial College London. Ian is about start a Post-Doc at the Coral Reef Centre of Excellence in Queensland Australia and will be working with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service to study the financial and ecological performance of their terrestrial protected areas.

Re-thinking Forest Governance in India: Integrating perspectives from different disciplines

The Indian forest sector is at a critical juncture right now, with the failure of Joint Forest Management (JFM) and the restructuring initiated by the Forest Rights Act 2006, both of which are denied / resisted by the foresters and many conservationists. What lessons does academic analysis provide for re-thinking forest governance in India? Early academic writing came from a subaltern perspective, highlighting the colonial takeover of people's forests and the overbearing post-colonial state. This easily fitted with institutional analysis highlighting the tragedy of open-access and the possibility of community-level forest management. The policy turn to co-management (i.e., JFM) in the early 1990s was supposedly meant to address the subaltern and the institutional analysts. In fact, however, academic analysis has generated divergent perspectives, none of which appear to grapple fully with the complexity of issues. The institutional analysis literature has continued to focus largely on 'conditions for collective action'. The political ecologists have pointed to the continued power of the forest department under JFM, but also the oversimplification of 'community'. The environmental economists are focused on econometric analysis of participation in JFM or on valuation of ecosystem services. Ecologists continue to suggest that saving 'pristine' forests by evicting people is the only way forward. In the meanwhile, events on the ground are unfolding in complex ways, with judicial over reach, the Forest Rights Act 2006, and emerging carbon markets. Using my experience in the central government committee on the Forest Rights Act, I shall argue that the ability of academic analysis to contribute constructively to forest policy-making will depend upon its ability to synthesize across and even go beyond its disciplinary perspectives. The transitions will have to be normative as well as theoretical. Normatively, we will have to embrace a wider set of concerns, combining sustainability, equity and quality of life. Theoretically, central issues include the recognition of multiple stakeholders and tradeoffs, the presence of uni-directionalities and need for regulation, and addressing questions of power creatively.

Sharachchandra Lele is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Environment and Development, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment (ATREE), an academic think-tank in Bangalore, India. He is currently at Cambridge as the Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. Sharad's research interests include conceptual issues in sustainable development and sustainability, and interdisciplinary analyses of institutional, economic, ecological, and technological issues in forest and water resource management. He was recently a member of the central government committee set up recently to assess the implementation of the landmark Forest Rights Act 2006 and to suggest a future role for the forest department.