sustainable development 20 years on from the ... - José Eli da Veiga

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monitoring have been instrumental in guiding actions to combat deforestation, as evidenced by Brazil’s
experience with satellite monitoring in the Amazon. 8 In total, 18% of the region’s forests are located in
protected areas (FAO, <strong>20</strong>11).
At present, 26 countries in the region have forest policies and 31 have forest laws, many of which
have been revised in the past <strong>20</strong> <strong>years</strong>. The earliest are in the Caribbean. Environmental policies and
legislation have been given an integrated approach to forest functions, services and values. Increasingly,
environmental, social and economic components are being incorporated into forest management, and
command and control actions are being combined with actions to transform the production patterns that
lead to deforestation. The International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) has highlighted the role of
land tenure and the potential for tenure by local communities. Brazil’s experience with adopting an
integrated approach to command and control actions, land regularization and transformation of the
production model serves as a benchmark (see box II.6) (FAO, <strong>20</strong>10a).
As mentioned in the previous section, much of the deforestation in the region is due to large-scale
agricultural and livestock activities (extensive in the case of livestock production). A major challenge in
combating deforestation is the fact that the profitability of <strong>sustainable</strong> activities is often compared
unfavourably with activities such as livestock production, permanent cropping or un<strong>sustainable</strong> timber
harvesting, as traditional measures of profitability are short-termist and ignore the positive externalities of
standing forest and the negative externalities of activities resulting in deforestation.
In many countries there have been efforts to develop non-wood products or supply chains (see
box II.7). In addition, markets have begun to realize the value of some ecosystem services provided by
forests, such as carbon sequestration. The region’s forests harbour a large proportion of the world’s
carbon stocks (see section II.b.1). Forest ecosystem services are still not evaluated comprehensively
(water storage and recycling, soil fertility, pollination and seed dispersal, microclimate, support
for biodiversity).
With regard to the timber industry, in <strong>20</strong>05 wood removals marketed in the Latin American and
Caribbean formal market were worth a total of US$ 6.8 billion, accounting for 7% of global
extractions. Although this figure represents only 5% of the global planted forest area (FAO, <strong>20</strong>11), the
region is emerging as a leader in high-productivity forest plantations, in many cases benefitting from
government policies. South America has become the foremost investment destination for pulp and
paper producers from the region and the rest of the world, even though some of the consequences of
this trend have been called into question. The forest area set aside for production, based on a
management plan approved by the State, has increased from 73 million hectares in 1990 to just over 78
million hectares in <strong>20</strong>00 and 83 million hectares in <strong>20</strong>10 (FAO, <strong>20</strong>11). The area assigned to certified
forest production in the region grew from a little under 3.1 million hectares in <strong>20</strong>02 to nearly
13.5 million hectares in <strong>20</strong>10, meaning that it increased by an annual average of just over 1.25 million
hectares. 9 Certification programmes in the forestry industry assess forest management systems,
environmental impact and social and economic factors. A certification seal guarantees global standards
of good management.
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9
See [online] http://www.obt.inpe.br/prodes/.
GEO Data Portal [online] http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/ [date of reference: December <strong>20</strong>11].