Year of publication 2003

For forests, one of the first ‘post-Rio’ moves was to promote the development and use of criteria and indicators (C&I) for sustainable forest management. This was made easier by the fact that the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) had published the first set of C&I for the sustainable management of natural tropical forests just before the Summit. Since then, many sets have been developed, often with the assistance of international organizations, and almost every country is now covered by at least one set. The awareness of the need for environment protection raised during the Rio Summit was followed by calls for a boycott of tropical timber by some environmental NGOs, who deemed the harvesting of tropical timber for trade and industrial purposes to be a prime cause of forest degradation in the tropics. The response of the African Timber Organization (ATO) was to develop, with the financial assistance of the European Union and the technical collaboration of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), a set of principles, criteria and indicators (PCI) to promote the sustainable management of African forests. In the meantime, ITTO had revised and updated its 1992 set of C&I based on experiences acquired in the implementation of sustainable forest management in tropical countries and research advances in this field, publishing a new set in 1998. Thus, African member countries of ATO and ITTO found themselves with two sets of C&I; it made sense to build on these sets to develop a unique and harmonized set applicable to African tropical forests.