The Growing Mandate of Forest Inventories
This introductory Chapter describes briefly the rapid emergence of new genera of problems, like climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, etc., not much heard of say 40 years back. These problems are not only conceptually complex, but internati
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The Growing Mandate of Forest Inventories
1.1 Emerging Environmental Problems This introductory chapter will briefly describe the rapid emergence of a new genera of problems, like climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, etc., not much heard of say 40 years back. These problems are not only conceptually complex, but international in scope, calling for consistent information at national, regional, and global levels in the form of a time series. This poses a problem to tropical countries as many of them lack institutional capacity as well as financial resources to collect and provide information. Techniques and technology are advancing fast to ameliorate the situation, but in turn, they also create problems for continuity and compatibility of national/global assessments. The twin issues, viz., strategy for national/global forest assessments and strategy for country capacity development for the purpose, are the main concerns of the book. The Stockholm Conference on Human Environment 1972 sowed the seeds of change by bringing environment issues in the global focus. In the background was the report:‘‘Limits to Growth’’, published a year before by the Club of Rome, which questioned the sustainability of exponentially rising trends of consumption of the planet’s limited resources, arising from the unprecedented population growth, rising per capita income, fuelled by scientific and technological advances (Meadow et al. 1972). Forests and forestry dominated the debate. The Conference recommended countries to: • Strengthen basic and applied research for improved forest planning and management with emphasis on environmental functions of forests; • Modernize forest management concepts by including multiple functions and reflecting the cost and benefits of amenities which forests provide; and • Introduce a minimum of management plans where none currently exist and where governments already committed, should increase their efforts.
K. D. Singh, Capacity Building for the Planning, Assessment, and Systematic Observations of Forests, Environmental Science and Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32292-1_1, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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1 The Growing Mandate of Forest Inventories
The Conference recommended the UN Secretary General to take steps to ensure that: • UN Bodies cooperate to meet the needs for new knowledge to incorporate environmental values in the national land use and forest management; and • Support continuing surveillance of the world’s forest cover through establishment (in countries) of appropriate monitoring systems. Though many of the global problems, like climate change and biological diversity, were not explicitly mentioned, the basic direction for the national action and global thinking was well laid at Stockholm. The ensuing account will present the rising importance of environment in the global development debate.
1.2 The Road from Stockholm to Rio The two important outcomes of the Stockholm Conference were: (i) Establishment of United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) i
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