Suchergebnisse

The Peruvian Amazon is an important arena in global efforts to promote sustainable logging in the tropics. Despite recent efforts to achieve sustainability, such as provisions in the US–Peru Trade Promotion Agreement, illegal logging continues to plague the region. We present evidence that Peru's legal logging concession system is enabling the widespread illegal logging via the regulatory documents designed to ensure sustainable logging. Analyzing official government data, we found that 68.3% of all concessions supervised by authorities were suspected of major violations. Of the 609 total concessions, nearly 30% have been cancelled for violations and we expect this percentage to increase as investigations continue. Moreover, the nature of the violations indicate that the permits associated with legal concessions are used to harvest trees in unauthorized areas, thus threatening all forested areas. Many of the violations pertain to the illegal extraction of CITES-listed timber species outside authorized areas. These findings highlight the need for additional reforms.

'Logging the Globe' by M. Patricia Marchak is reviewed.

Papers on optimal harvesting regimes for maximizing land expectation value (LEV) that compare different logging practices often ignore differences in variable costs and in damages on the residual stand between logging practices. We use data on a multi-age, multi-species forest in East-Kalimantan to study optimal harvest regimes for Conventional Logging (CL) and for Reduced Impact Logging (RIL). We simulate a range of carbon prices with compensation for additional carbon stored under sustainable forest management (RIL). According to our detailed data, RIL has higher fixed costs but lower variable costs than CL, and leads to less damages on the residual stand. We show that when these differences are taken into account, RIL leads to highest LEV for low to intermediate carbon prices, while for high carbon prices conventional logging is preferred. Conventional logging, however, does not qualify for carbon payments. Furthermore, we show that ignoring damages in the model leads to vast overestimations of LEV and large underestimations of optimal cutting cycles for all carbon prices, and to a different choice of logging practice for low and high carbon prices. Ignoring differences in variable costs between CL and RIL leads to small overestimations of LEV for low carbon prices and small underestimations of LEV for high carbon prices, with small to zero differences in optimal cutting cycles.