Will Biodiversity Be Conserved in Locally-Managed Forests?

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a rapid movement towards decentralising forest rights and tenure to local communities and indigenous groups in both developing and developed nations. Attribution of local and community rights to forests appears to be gathering increasing momentum in many tropical developing countries. Greater local control of forest resources is a response to the failure of government agencies to exercise adequate stewardship over forests and to ensure that the values of all stakeholders are adequately protected. We reviewed evidence of the impact of decentralised forest management on the biodiversity values of forests and conclude that special measures are needed to protect these values. There are trade-offs between shorter-term local needs for forest lands and products and longer-term global needs for biodiversity and other environmental values. We present evidence of local forest management leading to declining forest integrity with negative impacts on both local forest users and the global environment. We advocate greater attention to measures to ensure protection of biodiversity in locally-managed forests.

Biodiversity in Locally Managed Lands

“…The impetus for decentralized management is coming largely from civil society organizations whose mandate is to champion the rights of local and indigenous communities [5,6]. We have encountered numerous examples of community organizations who claim that local management provides the best option for conserving biodiversity, but we have found very few scientific studies in the peer-reviewed literature that substantiate these claims.…”

“…They were not surprised by this, pointing to the fact that people who have lived more or less isolated from world markets have recently become connected to them and now aspire to become modern consumers enjoying the benefits of modern technology, just like the rest of us. In the same vein, we should not be surprised to find that local management priorities are not necessarily aligned with public good outcomes like the protection of biodiversity [6]. Boedhihartono [5] shows that even relatively remote and isolated communities in Indonesia's forests have little incentive to conserve all components of biodiversity.…”

SDG 15: Life on Land – The Central Role of Forests in Sustainable Development

“…Some communities that have maintained strong control over their lands and resources remain effective in achieving desirable conservation outcomes and are willing to see large tracts of land set aside in perpetuity: an example is the protection of Papua's Foja Mountains and large areas of the Mamberamo Valley that are held to be sacred (Sheil et al 2015). Nonetheless, in many cases there is a tension between the management of resources for local goals and the need to conserve public goods values (Sayer et al 2017).…”

“…While most areas will be under community forestry schemes, an increasing proportion of forestland will now come under the private ownership of Indigenous groups. Considerable uncertainty remains as to how the behaviour of communities will change in response to these new land-tenure arrangements (Sayer et al 2017). More than 40 million ha of the forest estate is licenced to concessionaires: 21.49 million ha for timber exploitation and 19.4 million for oil palm plantations (McCarthy and Robinson 2016).…”

The Critical Nexus and Implications of Smallholder Tobacco Production as a Livelihood Strategy to Forest Landscapes in Zimbabwe

“…The rising need for land to cater for the economy in a way that allows conservation, ecosystem service functions and supporting the livelihoods of rural communities pose a daunting task in the governance of land resources [15]. Ongoing deforestation, deterioration of forest resources in conjunction with loss of biodiversity and habitat fragmentation in the tropics have been a worldwide concern [16][17][18][19]. This is because on a global scale, about 1.6 billion people's livelihoods are anchored on forest resources in the rural areas which have negative effects on the environment including climate change [20].…”