The chief orientations of this paper, as it includes long-term strategy for global forest monitoring with emphasis on developing countries still with low or no national capacities, will revolve around the following aspects:
• Defining national forest and environment policies to be an integrated part of the global government policies.
• Expressing these policies in a set of implementing strategies, forestry and environmental laws and regulations.
• Initiating management programmes of these resources according to these laws and strategic frameworks.
• Creating permanent organisational structures to apply these laws, implement strategies, plan and implement inventory and monitoring programmes.
• Providing means for monitoring the evolution of the resources with time as result of the national policy, national programmes and all controllable and uncontrollable environmental factors.
Elements of capacity building to be detailed further:
- Review of national policies and inclusion of forest monitoring systems in Government policy orientations and programmes.
- Assistance to countries with limited capacities in developing national forest inventory structures within their forestry services.
- Assistance to governments, with funds and techniques, to carry out periodic inventories.
- Development, in collaboration with the national authorities, of methodologies for forest inventories (standardised with FAO procedures).
- Provision to national teams of on-the-job and overseas training in forest inventory and related activities.
