Rationale
FAO¿s periodic global assessment of the forests was designed to monitor changes and trends of different parameters of the resources. Processes within the forests - degradation and/or improvement- and between forests and other land use classes through afforestation, deforestation and reforestation are important parameters to monitor through successive assessments. With the implementation of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, accurate estimates of carbon stores in the forests and trees outside forest at the national level is becoming increasingly important. Monitoring of criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management, biodiversity, etc is becoming at the centre of interest of policy makers and managers of resources at all levels.
The role of forests and trees outside forest in food security is valuable and need to be properly assessed by the national forest inventories and global forest assessments. Forests and trees provide food, shelter, employment and other wood and non wood goods and a wide range of services that are vital to people in the rural areas to sustain their livelihood. National inventories should thus address these issues and assess such a role. It should also establish the role of man and woman in resources management and use.
It is not difficult to find arguments for standardised collection of forest and forestry information that can be used for international analyses or comparisons (eg Lanly 1996, Lund 1996). The argument from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNICED) 1992 is often called upon. The United Nations conventions on biological diversity, climate change and desertification are other milestones. On a more general level, international economic analyses and forecasting require reliable input concerning the forestry sector. The implementation of these international processes require monitoring of the forest (and other) ecosystems including the production of goods and services, as well as the legal and political frameworks for the management of land and natural resources.
Public consumption of environmental information is on the increase as the sophisticated communication technologies help the access to information through different media.
The international assessments of forests and forestry have developed from a timber oriented mode some decades ago, to include broad environmental factors, as well as socio-economic aspects. The imaginary land use boundary between forests and agricultural land has become vague as trees are increasingly grown outside the forests, and the values of non-wood forest products are being accounted for. Several environmental parameters, such as carbon cycling and biodiversity, are not confined within the land use classifications. It is thus clear that international assessments of forests and forestry should increasingly be cross-sectoral and include interactions with agriculture and remote benefits from the forest.
The FRA support to national forest inventories aims at helping countries in developing or strengthening their capacities for continued national inventories. It also aims at broadening the knowledge base of the countries on forests and tree resources at the national level based on reliable field data collected at a moderate cost on a wide range of biophysical and on management and uses parameters. The inventory approach is designed as a compromise between the volume of data needed, the precision of results and the cost of the survey. Moderate investment in data collection is expected to stimulate and encourage recipient countries and donors alike to invest in forest resources monitoring through continuous inventories.
The approach is founded on collaborative partnership between concerned governments and donors with FAO facilitating the cooperation. The Committee on Forestry in its fifteenth session in March 2001 was informed on the approach and supported, in principle the idea, recognizing its potential to improve the availability and quality of national level data and information and as useful complement to FAO¿s periodic global forest resources assessments.