Sustainable management of tropical forests is essential for conserving the ecosystem services they provide and protecting the livelihoods of the millions of people who depend on these forests. Community-based forest management in Quintana Roo, Mexico, has shown that conserving forests while generating economic benefits is achievable in the tropics. However, this management is carried out with technical gaps that jeopardize sustainable use of these resources. Crucial among these gaps is a lack of equations for precise calculations of logged timber volumes. Current equations employ a proportion of bark volume (PBV) of 0.14 for mahogany and a flat 0.10 for species with dense woods, despite their wide variation in bark thickness. Here, using Meyer's method, we calculated species-specific PBVs for the most commercially-important species in the Felipe Carrillo Puerto community-based logging operation. For most species, the new PBVs were smaller, indicating that wood volumes are currently underestimated. However, for two species, PBVs were higher. New values could influence the profits of the local enterprise and on the management of some of the most commercially-important species of Mexico's tropical forests through changes in the numbers of individuals felled.
Innovations are a key component of the forest bioeconomy. Many types of innovations are needed for an efficient forest bioeconomy to be deployed. This article aimed to analyze the scientific literature on the topic of innovations in the forest bioeconomy, to understand where we are and where we are likely to be in the future, considering technologies, business models, etc. First, the scientific literature, in the form of peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Web of Science, was compiled in a comprehensive dataset, on which we analyzed the most important authors, their affiliations, regions they come from, journals where papers were most commonly published, and under which categories the papers were indexed. The total number of papers matching the keywords was 161. We found that the number of papers published on the topic is increasing and that, on average, each paper was cited 18 times. A total of 504 authors dealt with the topic, presenting a rather small community. This finding was reinforced by the outcomes of the analysis of regions where the authors of the papers were affiliated—Europe being the region to which most papers were affiliated. We conducted a qualitative synthesis of the literature on forest bioeconomy innovations. We found that authors dealt with the necessary adaptation of policies, while innovations were mainly focused on biorefining, biotechnology, production of various biomaterials, as well as innovations of business models and stakeholder interactions.
The 2012 European Bioeconomy Strategy has been adopted in some European countries' national policies. However, it has not been officially included in the Czech Republic's national policy. In Sweden, the Bioeconomy Strategy has been adopted in the national policy and the National Forest Programme (NFP). The paper reviews the current forest policy in the Czech Republic in meeting the purposes of the forestbased bioeconomy by performing a comparative study between the Czech Republic and Sweden. As bioeconomy principles are core values in the Swedish NFP it aims not only to deliver sustainable forest products and ecosystem services to support forest enterprises but also to achieve a fossil-fuel-free Sweden. Although the Czech Forest Policy denotes the European Bioeconomy Strategy as one of the reference documents, it does not directly relate to shifting from fossil fuels to bioenergy. The implementation of the Czech document is limited to the forest-based sector. Bioeconomy principles are expected to be included in inter-ministerial committees at the government level in the Czech Republic. The challenges faced by the country include fulfilling the provision of sustainable forest biomass and high added-value products while harmonising forest policies and regulations.
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