Pilot study on assessment of status of sustainability of forest resources in India

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) compiles and publishes Global Forest Re sources Assessment (GFRA) periodically. As per the direction of Committee on Forestry ICOFOI 2001, an expert consultation was held at Kotaka in July 2002 to deal with the general framework of GFRA programme. One of the recommendations was to use the Criteria & Indicators for Thematic Areas), common to various internal processes. for development of future GFRA. As a follow up to this, a meeting of Advisory Group (AG) to GFRA was held in Nairobi in October 2002 where a methodology was proposed which incorporated measurement of several global variables to address each criteria for sustainable forest management (SFM). It was also suggested that a pilot sutdy be conducted in a few countries to test and modify the proposed methodology.

Accordingly, India was selected as one of the countries for conducting such a pilot study and the responsibility for the same was given to Forest Survery of India (FSI). FSI is an organization under the Ministry of Environment & Forests (Government of India) which has been carrying out assessment of forest cover in the country on biennial basis for the last 17 years along with conducting field surverys to estimate growing stock and distribution of trees inside and outside forest areas. The aim of the pilot study was to develop a methodology for assessment of sustainability of forest resources in the country and to make its approximate quantitative assessment in the process. This was accomplished through two Expert Consultations held at FSI Headquarters in Dehradun (India). In all, 33 exparts from diverse fields were invited to deliberate upon the Criteria and Variables selected for the study. The relative "weights to the Criteria and selected Variables were arrived at by consenuses and through the process of "Group Convergence Method." The final outcome shows that the over all status of sustainability of forest resources in India may be classified mildly as "Towards sustainability. Although, the situation is still not very satisfactory but the country as a whole seems to be moving in the right direction.

The document discribes the methodology employed for the pilot study and presents the intermediate and final outcome in Part 1. The voluminous Part-ll contains six Annexures detailing the different data and trends for each variable under each criterion based on which the sustainability of forest resources was assessed. These were researched and compiled by the individual experts who presented it to the group.

Forest Survey of India trusts that the present report will succeed in increasing awareness of key issues in the factory sector of India today and in providing valuable information that contributes to the achievement of sustainable forest management. The authors would be pleased to hear from the readers and would welcome comments, ideas and information that may be useful for further enriching the information already provided.