By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Dec 9 2003 (IPS)

Protection of woodlands and a selective logging policy are both essential for sustainable management of forests, two leading institutions say.

The World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) have come together to present new objectives of their alliance.

“The main goal of our alliance is to significantly reduce the rate of loss and degradation of all forest types,” the World Bank’s vice-president for environmentally and socially sustainable development Ian Johnson said at a conference held by the two instituions last week.

“Protection of forests is central for the reduction of pollution and to guarantee biodiversity,” Johnson added.

By 2005 both institutions want to see 50 million hectares of forest classified worldwide as new protected areas where logging is forbidden.

The World Bank and the WWF also aim to improve conservation policies in another 50 million hectares of forest considered protected areas but which face considerable degradation.

A third objective of the alliance is to introduce rigorous rules to govern economic exploitation of forests that guarantee both conservation and their use for development.

– Sustainable economic use of forests is a controversial subject,” Johnson told IPS. ôEnvironmental purists argue that the only sensible policy for woodlands is strict conservation.”

But this ignores woodlands as ôan asset, an economic resource, whose utilisation is crucial for millions of people,” he added.

More than 400 million people around the world depend directly on forests for sustenance. The International Labour Organisation says economic activity related to wood and manufactured forest products is worth more than 450 billion dollars and 47 million jobs.

The World Bank and the WWF have together proposed rules for logging to ensure that this economic exploitation of woodlands does not lead to environmental degradation.

These rules allow for the logging of the equivalent of one tree per hectare, WWF president Claude Martin told IPS. “Another rule is the regional rotation of logging to take into consideration that forests need approximately 30 to 35 years to recuperate from logging.”

Martin said the WWF has created an independent control agency to certify sustainable economic management of forests.

But both World Bank and WWF experts acknowledge that their alliance has a long way to go before it can reach its goals.

Director for the global forest programme at the alliance Bruce Cabarle said that only some 20 million hectares being economically exploited now meet the criteria of sustainable economic use. That represents 10 percent of the goal of 200 million hectares.

Cabarle said the World Bank, the WWF, and other institutions have identified five major forest regions where efforts can be improved. These areas are the Amazon region in Brazil, the Congo Basin in Central and Western Africa, tropical forests in China and Papua New Guinea, and an area in the Himalayas.

In Brazil the Amazon Region Protected Areas Programme (ARPA) seeks to protect an additional 50 million hectares of forest by 2012. This conservation programme would enlarge protected forests threefold to an area equivalent to the size of Spain.

In the Congo Basin, the second largest tract of primary moist forest on earth, conservation programmes aim to identify some 30 million hectares of woodland spread across six countries to be classified as effectively managed forest areas.

In Asia and in the South Pacific region, the two institutions aim to establish zones of sustainable managed forests over 15 million hectares in Papua New Guinea, and to increase the protected forest area in China from 130 million hectares to 160 million hectares by 2010.

The alliance is working to restore wildlife corridors in the Terai arc in the Himalayas across Nepal and India. The arc covers more than three million hectares and 11 protected areas and forests from the Rajaji national park in the northwest in India to the Parsa wildlife reserve in Nepal.

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