Sustainable forest management to enhance the resilience of forests to climate change (FSP)

The project’s objective is to enable local communities in four Chinese provinces to effectively employ incentive-based sustainable forest management (SFM) practices in reforestation and forest restoration activities, enhancing carbon storage and sequestration as well as biodiversity conservation.  In order to achieve this objective, the project will utilize four ongoing developments that can be directly related to SFM and serve as starting point to successfully and sustainably mainstream SFM practices into China’s forestry sector:

1. Decentralization of forest management structures;
2. Emergence of a strong forest certification mechanism;
3. Creation of a comprehensive forest inventory and carbon monitoring system;
4. Establishment of a national carbon market.

China:

• Henan Province
• Guanxi Autonomous Region
• Hainan Dao Province
• Fujihan Province

The combination of the four trends under the objective, all strongly backed by political interest and government commitment, creates a promising window of opportunity for project activities to create a high amount of Global Environmental Benefits with relatively small incremental investments. This project is designed to make full use of this opportunity.

Environmental impact assessment

As a GEF Project, the proposed initiative aims at the generation of global as well as local environmental benefits. Accordingly, the very nature of the project objective and its expected outcomes and outputs makes negative environmental impacts highly unlikely. Nevertheless, national and provincial level experts have conducted a thorough evaluation of all project activities as listed under section 2 to ensure that no unintended environmental effects can arise from the project. In addition, the project framework underwent all environmental safeguard procedures in place at the national level under SFA project implementation rules as well as at the provincial level under the corresponding rules of the Provincial Forest Departments.

Project components

Component 1: Strengthened institutional, policy and regulatory frameworks for the implementation of sustainable forest management from national to local level, creating a basis for enhanced biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration.

Component 2: Demonstration and adoption of SFM practices, enhancing carbon storage and improving biodiversity conservation.

Component 3: Training and capacity development; awareness raising and knowledge exchange; monitoring, evaluation and dissemination of best practices.