Last year I was in the famed Golden Teak forests of Central Myanmar. For centuries timber from these forests not only framed the templed cities of Southeast Asia but also found its way into furniture in North America and yacht decks in the Mediterranean. Myanmar was known for the rigor of the forest management system perfected under British Colonial rule.
Yet in recent years mismanagement of the forest had taken its toll. When I was there, teak trees were fewer in number than they were a generation ago and those that remained were smaller in diameter than was to be expected. This observation made me wonder if these teak forests are ultimately resilient to the changes that are going on, or if they are destined to look very differently a generation from now.
I think when most of us in the conservation world think of resilience, we think of ecological resilience — the ability of an ecosystem, like a forest, or a population of plants or animals to survive, or even thrive, under stress. The greater the diversity, the more likely a system will maintain its resilience over time. We also think of climate resilience — the ability of an ecosystem to adapt to changing climatic conditions. And, generally the larger the scale or greater the variation in altitude the more likely a system will be able to respond to changing climatic patterns. In this context, resilience is an obvious goal for our work at The Nature Conservancy. This goal may even seem simple given the growing challenges our world faces.
But ecological and climatic resilience are not the only facets of this complex concept. Resilience also has social and economic dimensions. As such, real resilience is a much more ambitious goal, and our investments in the forest sector need to adapt accordingly.
Forests for Social Resilience in Papua New Guinea
New Guinea, shared by Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, is the world’s second-largest island, and 65 percent of it is blanketed in some of the world’s richest tropical rainforests. Across the island, the relationship between local communities and the forests they live in and near is currently undergoing significant change. Outsiders are seeking to access forest resources, which are increasingly valued in local, regional and global markets. As a result, local communities that rely on healthy forests and the availability of forest products for their use can be negatively impacted.
In Papua New Guinea’s Adelbert Mountains, the Conservancy and our partners worked with anthropologists, botanists, ecologists and planners to help communities to develop a visual depiction of their traditional and often orally based approaches to land-use planning and management. In this process, community members developed a clearer and agreed sense of their roles, rights and responsibilities for resource management with respect to each other and the interactions between neighboring communities.
We then worked with provincial government officials to develop an appropriate legal instrument to make this approach to land-use planning official. These community-led plans can now serve as the foundation for decision-making surrounding resource use and allocation throughout the province.
Communities own 97 percent of the land in Papua New Guinea, and now these Adelberts communities are equipped with the tools to be socially resilient to the inevitable changes that are occurring and will continue to occur across their forests.
Building Economic Resilience in Indonesia
Forests have long had an explicit value reflected broadly as their economic contribution to a country’s GDP, employment and tax revenue. Yet, in many countries, the conventionally defined value of forests has been diminished by over-exploitation, competition from other sectors, and/or changing global norms. These changes are undermining the traditional incentive to keep forests in their natural state — the forest’s economic value. If that value cannot be maintained, then the likelihood that they will be converted for agricultural use becomes greater.
In response to global market pressures, public agencies and corporate actors in Indonesia and other forested nations are committing to ensure that forestry operations do not undermine, ecological sustainability or the welfare of adjacent communities. Verification of legality and independent certification of responsibility are two concepts that are gaining global acceptance in meeting market expectations. To advance these concepts the Conservancy and our partners engaged ecologists, forest engineers and anthropologists to provide training and technical assistance in forest planning and management, helping companies that are managing large areas of forest move down a step-wise approach to verification and certification. In addition, we worked with a broad multi-stakeholder group to establish new norms of legality and responsibility which could meet market demands, thereby solidifying access and maintaining the all-important “social license to operate.”
This effort ultimately enhanced the economic value of the forest preventing conversion to alternate uses. Making our forests economically resilient to changing values and expectations of society is critical to their long-term survival.
I thought about these types of resilience earlier this year, when I was in South Africa at the World Forestry Congress organized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). One of the key topics of discussion was resilience. I realized that “resilience” is one of those loaded terms that likely meant 10 different things to 10 different people depending on their training, skill sets and organizational mission.
But for the Conservancy, with a mission to conserve the lands and water upon which all life depends, we are compelled to step back and take in the broader perspective. This means bringing science — physical and social — into the setting of management objectives for our work with public agencies, corporate actors and community groups. This is the key to the long-term resilience — ecological, climatic, social and economic — of our forested landscapes and to the people who rely on these forests to sustain their futures.
