Countries

Legislation
The legal basis for the Ministry of the Environment¿s authority in the forestry sector is found in the Law on Forests, the Conservation of Natural Areas and Wildlife promulgated in 1982, but mainly in the reform of the regulations contained in this law. In principle, the law states that on the basis of the collection of duties or taxes on forest harvesting ¿ sums that are very far from sufficient ¿ the government should take responsibility for national forest management, particularly resource replacement.

A further ratification of the ministry¿s authority in forest issues is found in the recently issued Rules for Sustainable Forest Management for Timber Harvesting (2000). The ministry¿s authority will also shortly be boosted with the draft Sustainable Forest Development Law.

Institutions
The National Forest Directorate is part of the Ministry of the Environment¿s Natural Assets Subsecretariat. The Ministry of the Environment was established in 1996 and is in charge of three basic sectors: forestry, biodiversity (including the National System of Protected Areas) and environment quality. In 1998, forestry activities were declared a national priority and orders were given to promote all aspects of such activities. In 1999 the Ecuadorian Institute for Forestry, National Areas and Wildlife was merged with the Ministry of the Environment.

The National Forest Directorate is the only national-level governmental forest institution in Ecuador that plays a major role in managing forest resources and in controlling activities in the sector. It has no governing board, but is under the charge of a National Forest Director. Its structure consists of a central office in Quito and offices in all the provinces except for the Galapagos Islands. These provincial offices are known as regional district headquarters and they have authority over technical offices and senior forest and biodiversity staff.

The sustainable forest development strategy laid down modification of the legal framework as the starting point for the new approach to forest management, and the Ministry of the Environment therefore drew up a draft Law on Ecuador¿s Sustainable Forest Development. The aim is to promote forestry resources, ensuring security of land tenure, making the market for goods and services offered by forests and forest plantations and their biodiversity transparent and competitive, and promoting the integration of the sector into markets and the national economic agenda by incorporating it into decisions on credit, tax and monetary policy.

The Ministry of the Environment is at present working to decentralize and devolve forest resources administration and management to regional and local government levels (prefectures and municipalities) and provincial regional forest districts. Decentralization will be carried out in line with the economic and technical capacities that local governments have developed and are developing, and the capacity they show to fulfil their newly assumed responsibilities efficiently and transparently.

The Ecuadorian State has no body concerned specifically with gathering, collating and processing data on the forestry sector, and thus acting as a specialized centre for this type of information. However, there are various centres in the public and private sectors (some with considerable support from international donors) that generate and manage information on forest resources.

The Ecuadorian Remote Sensing Centre was established in 1977 with the task of producing inventories, studies and evaluations of Ecuador¿s renewable and non-renewable natural resources through remote sensing. In 1997 work was started on setting up the Geocodified Information System on Natural Resources and the Environment, with a view to uniting all the results of the work carried out by the Remote Sensing Centre in a single database so that governmental, non-governmental and private-sector organizations could have easy access to such information.

Last updated: March 2003