Sustainable Forest Management

The lives of one in five people on earth (1.6 billion people) depend directly on forests! And, beyond their economic importance for humans, forests provide irreplaceable ecosystem services. For these reasons we support the implementation of sustainable forest management.

The issues

Forests do not only produce wood! They also provide fruit, resins, gums, oils, dyes, medicines, etc. They play a role in protecting water resources, soil and biodiversity. The “mining” of forests has led to disasters and only sustainable management can reconcile all these aspects. This sustainable management can have as its primary objective the conservation of forests (protected areas, natural parks, etc.) or their sustainable exploitation (classified state forests, community forests, private forest concessions, etc.). Much remains to be done, especially in tropical forests threatened by illegal logging and deforestation… Thus, out of nearly 4 billion hectares of forests worldwide, 460 million hectares (about 12%) currently have conservation status and very few benefit from forest certification (e.g. the Forest Stewardship Council covers only 185 million hectares, less than 5% of the world’s forests). Promoting sustainable forest management is not just a matter of drawing up a management plan, but of identifying, understanding and reconciling the interests of the various forest users in sometimes complex and tense contexts.

Our services

We contribute to the preparation and revision of forest management plans by carrying out forest inventories (including remote sensing, satellite imagery, GIS), biodiversity studies and socio-economic studies. We analyse and model forest dynamics at different scales, from the tree (forest auto-ecology, allometric equations, etc.) to the stand (wood and NTFP flows, forest degradation and deforestation, biological connectivity, forest fires, etc.). These analyses are particularly useful for identifying measures to protect the ecosystem services of forests (carbon sinks, protection of biodiversity, soils, water, etc.) and to promote forest adaptation to climate change. Finally, we provide tailor-made training (forest management, cartography, statistics and economic analysis, fire control, greenhouse gas inventories in the forestry sector, etc.) for various stakeholders (forestry services, environmental NGOs, forest operators and users, etc.). It should be noted that SalvaTerra’s forestry expertise is robust and certified by the Centre national d’expertise foncière, agricole et forestière (CNEFAF), a status that allows it to offer forestry expertise in an amicable or judicial context (expertise enforceable in court in the latter case).