The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) principles and criteria have been implemented in over 80 community forests in Nepal over the last decade. However, the total size of community forests certified under the FSC certification is relatively small (0.1% of the total area of the country), which limits the overall benefits they can provide to the surrounding communities. The national government has instituted the Collaborative Forest Management (CFM) initiative to maintain forest connectivity and give local communities jurisdiction over the nearby forests that they and their ancestor have lived with and managed for many generations. The CFM policies strive to ensure the restoration of large and continuous patches of forest, equitable benefit sharing of forest products and good governance, yet these policies do not certify the forests as sustainably managed, and thus cannot provide increased prices on the international market for products from these forests. Two collaborative forests were assessed in the Tarai region of Nepal to understand how well these community managed forests already follow the FSC principles and where changes must be made for these forests to be certified in the future. Field observations were undertaken, focus group discussions held, and semi-structured interviews carried out in order to understand current management practices in these two collaborative managed forests. Findings showed that the CFM helped improve biodiversity and benefit sharing from the forest amongst the wide range of communities. Collaboratively managed forests and FSC principles were shown to have complementary objectives: to sustain forests, strengthen forest governance and conserve indigenous species and knowledge, and it is argued that these plans can be synchronized for the benefit of both forests and people.

3 Thani et al.After initiation of community forestry system in Nepal, the status of forest cover has improved due to significant roles of people in conservation, management and utilization of forest resources. As a result of increased productivity of the forest and restoration of degraded areas, forest users have been able to receive various economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits to strengthen their livelihood. Despite many positive outcomes of community forestry, there are still some factors which haven't allowed the proper biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services maintenance. The study carried out on 100 operational plans from different parts of the country and it showed that the incorporation status of biodiversity and ecosystem services into community forest operational plan is worse despite the fact that such plan is the main component to lead the destination of any community forest. In addition to this, some gaps and challenges were observed in community forestry which have not favoured to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services management systematically at an optimum level. Among them, duplication problem of biodiversity and ecosystem services related issues in operational plan; timber oriented operational plan; limited provision about wildlife conservation and negative perception of people on wildlife and their conservation owing to human wildlife conflict; dominant socioeconomic factors; impact of introduced species, invasive and alien species; lacking in provision of adaptation and mitigation methods to cope with impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services and shrinking of biological corridor due to habitat fragmentation were major issues. Besides this, to address these issues, it was also identified from the national consultation workshop of forest officials and experts that most appropriate uniform methods, measures and mechanisms are needed to be developed for the complete assessment, prioritization, analysis and development of action plans to main stream biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services management into operational plan of community forestry.