This document discusses forests' contribution to sustainability. It defines sustainability as meeting present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own needs. The document outlines two approaches to ensuring sustainability: regulatory and voluntary market-based methods. It provides examples of each, including carbon sequestration programs that provide offsets for storing carbon in forests, forest certification programs that evaluate forest management practices, and the Montreal Process agreement between 12 countries to sustainably manage boreal and temperate forests.

1. FORESTS’ CONTRIBUTION TO A
SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
Sayeed R. Mehmood, PhD
AFA Annual Meeting
September 24, 2014

2. WHAT DOES SUSTAINABILITY MEAN?
sus·tain·able
adjective sə-ˈstā-nə-bəl
: able to be used without being completely
used up or destroyed
: involving methods that do not completely
use up or destroy natural resources
: able to last or continue for a long time
Source: Miriam-Webster Dictionary

3. WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?
“Sustainability is improving human well being and
ensuring social equity for present and future
generations while safeguarding the planet's life-supporting
ecosystems.”
Chris Boone
Dean, School of Sustainability
Arizona State University

4. Source: Johann Dreo

5. APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY
 The society demands sustainability. It also expects
us to come up with ways to ensure that resources
are sustainably managed.
 There are two broad approaches to ensuring
sustainability:
 Regulatory approach.
 Voluntary, non-governmental, “market based”
approach.
 In the rest of the presentation, we will look at three
examples of efforts at ensuring resource
sustainability.

6. CARBON SEQUESTRATION
 We all remember the buzz around carbon
sequestration from a few years ago.
 The Chicago Climate Exchange was actively
enrolling landowners into the program for carbon
sequestration credits.
 Unfortunately, in the absence of a national policy
framework, that particular effort fell apart.
 However, the idea of forest carbon offset is still very
alive around the world, including North America.

9. CARBON SEQUESTRATION
 The State of California has officially launched its
cap-and-trade program.
 This caused a renewed interest in forestry offsets in
the U.S.
 Toward the end of 2013, California issued the first
forestry offset credits.
 The Willitis Woods project in Mendocino County
received 1.2 million offset credits.
 A forestry project in eastern Maine received another
200,000 credits.

10. CARBON SEQUESTRATION
 In 2009 U.S. forests absorbed an estimated 863
million metric tons of CO2e, about a third of that
from southern forests.
 Southern landowners have opportunities to
participate in a number of carbon offset programs
including:
 Climate Action Reserve (CAR)
 American Carbon Registry (ACR)
 Verified Carbon Standard (VCS)
 California Cap-and-Trade Program

11. CARBON SEQUESTRATION
 To be eligible for carbon offsets, some quality
criteria must be satisfied; this usually include:
 Verifiability
 Additionality
 Permanence
 Enforceability

12. FOREST CERTIFICATION
 Forest certification, or, forest management certification is
a process by which forest management practices are
evaluated against a set of standards (Washburn and
Block 2001).
 An important question is: Who certifies?
 The general consensus is that it should be performed by
an independent party, much like an audit.
 Many argue that in addition to being independent, the
certifying party should also be a third party i.e. no
relationship to the forest ownership.

13. FOREST CERTIFICATION
 The basic idea is to reward desirable forest
management practices.
 Assure consumers that the products are
manufactured from sustainable sources of
wood.
 It is intended to be a voluntary, non-regulatory,
and incentive-based approach to sustainable
forest management.

14. FOREST CERTIFICATION
 There a several different certification programs
available today. Examples include: Forest
Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable
Forestry Initiative (SFI), American Tree-Farm
System, ISO 14001 and Canadian Standards
Association (CSA).

19. FOREST CERTIFICATION
 Mendell and Hamsley (2013) evaluated the effects
of FSC and SFI certification standards on private
forests.
 The authors modeled the impacts on forest land in
the South and the Pacific Northwest.
 The southern model was based on 110,000 acres in
AR and LA.

20. FOREST CERTIFICATION

21. THE MONTREAL PROCESS
 The Montreal Process is basically an agreement
among 12 countries on the sustainable
management of the world’s boreal and temperate
forests.
 The process started with the 1992 United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), a.k.a. the Earth Summit.
 Eventually, 12 countries signed an agreement on
sustainable management of boreal and temperate
forests in Montreal, Canada.

22. THE MONTREAL PROCESS
 The 12 member nations are Argentina, Australia,
Canada, Chile, China, Japan, Republic of Korea,
Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, United States, and
Uruguay.
 The nations collectively hold 60 percent of the
world’s forests and about 90 percent of the boreal
and temperate forests.

23. THE MONTREAL PROCESS
 How does the monitoring process work?
 Not much differently than a certification process
would work.
 There are Criteria and Indicators and on the ground
monitoring is compared to a set of standards.
 The Montreal process is an example of how some
sustainability efforts can be not exactly regulatory,
nor completely voluntary, but somewhat in between.
 Why is this important?

24. Thank you!
Sayeed R. Mehmood
Phone: 870-460-1894
Email: mehmood@uamont.edu