No abstract

Growing concern about forest degradation and loss, combined with the political impetus supplied by the Earth Summit in 1992, led to the establishment of eleven intergovernmental, regional, and international forest-related processes focused on the use of criteria and indicators (C&I) for sustainable forest management (SFM). Up to 171 countries have participated in these processes to apply C&I frameworks as a tool for data collection, monitoring, assessment, and reporting on SFM and on achieving various forest-related UN Sustainable Development Goals. Based on an expert survey and literature analysis we identify six interlinked impact domains of C&I efforts: (1) enhanced discourse and understanding of SFM; (2) shaped and focused engagement of science in SFM; (3) improved monitoring and reporting on SFM to facilitate transparency and evidence-based decision-making; (4) strengthened forest management practices; (5) facilitated assessment of progress towards SFM goals; and (6) improved forest-related dialog and communication. We conclude that the 25-year history of C&I work in forestry has had significant positive impacts, though challenges do remain for the implementation of C&I and progress towards SFM. The work should be continued and carried over to other sectors to advance sustainability goals more broadly.

A sustainable and circular bioeconomy is a pathway to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 because the bioeconomy relates to a number of SDGs. We therefore focused on whether and how these SDGs are considered in national bioeconomy strategies, and on their indicator-based progress monitoring and assessment. This paper is based on eight countries that already have elaborated indicators in their national bioeconomy strategies. We analyzed the coverage of SDG issues in national bioeconomy strategies and the indicators used. We focused on how the different national indicators used to monitor the progress of the bioeconomy are related to the SDGs indicators and the already well established and widely applied intergovernmental regional or international forest-related indicators, as the forest sector is one of the key sectors for the development of a bioeconomy. Our material and methods are based on a document review and qualitative analysis of national bioeconomy strategies and their inherent indicator sets for progress monitoring. Based on our findings on the coverage of SDG-related issues of up to 14 out of the 17 SDGs in the bioeconomy strategies and of the high share of forest-related indicators within the bioeconomy indicators used, we derive recommendations for the further development of bioeconomy indicators. Our paper does not contribute to proposing the most suitable indicators, but it does encourage national and regional actors to carefully and holistically develop their bioeconomy monitoring systems using synergies from the already existing SDGs and forest monitoring processes.

The use of criteria and indicators (C&I) for data collection, monitoring, assessing and reporting on sustainable forest management (SFM) has been growing since the Earth Summit in 1992, supported by eleven intergovernmental, regional and international forest-related C&I processes. The initial effort led to varying levels of implementation across countries. Several processes never went much beyond the adoption of a first set of C&I while others have made substantial progress. In recent years, interest in C&I for SFM has again increased. In light of the Sustainable Development Goals and emerging global challenges the contribution of C&I to monitor, assess and report on forest conditions and trends is increasingly important. We compare and analyse the structure, activities and progress of the intergovernmental C&I processes. The work is based on document analysis and questionnaires sent to the secretariats of the processes and C&I experts. We found many similarities but also major differences in the structure and content of the C&I sets. The results provide a context for discussing and understanding why some of the C&I processes are successful in their work while others have stalled. Finally, we propose the required ingredients for success for the future activities of the forest-related intergovernmental C&I processes.

Two decades after the pan-European set of indicators for sustainable forest management was adopted, the European Commission published the New EU Forest Strategy for 2030. We compared the documents on the basis of a content analysis to determine whether they share the same understanding of sustainable forest management. We looked at whether, and to what extent, the existing indicator set is fit for purpose to monitor progress towards the Strategy’s objectives, and the delivery of policy commitments. About two thirds of the identified objectives and commitments in the Strategy can be monitored at least partially by the pan-European set of indicators, whereas new indicators or approaches need to be developed for the remaining third. Several of the indicators are not linked to the Strategy, and some of them are only weakly linked to the policy issues addressed in the Strategy. Our comparison shows a few significant differences between the comprehensive vision of sustainable forest management formulated in the indicator set and the scope of the objectives and commitments in the Strategy. In particular, the forest policy concerns reflected in the Strategy address several issues which are not fully covered in the pan-European indicator set.