Tool
/ Guidelines & methodologies
Making Forest Concessions in the Tropics Work to Achieve the 2030 Agenda: Voluntary Guidelines. FAO Forestry Paper 180
Sustainable wood products and their value chains can play a fundamental role in achieving the objectives stated in the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement, delivering a wide range of benefits to populations in remote forest areas as well as to local, regional and global society. Generation of income and employment, disaster risk reduction, and reduction of the material and carbon footprint of the planet are some of the direct contributions sustainable forest products can provide to the SDGs and the climate change commitments. Furthermore, sustainable management of natural forests reduces forest degradation and forest production can increase the opportunity cost for deforestation, while generating revenues for conservation strategies.
These Voluntary Guidelines for forest concessions focus on concessions as a forest policy instrument for the delivery of sustainable forest management in the tropics, building on lessons learned from success and failures in implementing forest concession. The guidelines offer a practical participatory management approach to support forest concession regimes to be reliable sources of sustainable wood and non-wood forest products and contribute to realizing the full contribution of forestry to the 2030 Agenda.