Standards and guidelines for forest plantation management: A global comparative study

Mauro Masiero, Laura Secco, Davide Pettenella and Lucio Brotto

Forest Policy and Economics, 2015, vol. 53, issue C, 29-44

Abstract: The increasing area covered by forest plantations creates a demand for trustworthy mechanisms to ensure they are responsibly established and managed. In the last twenty years efforts have increased to develop standards and guidelines as voluntary-based policy tools for guaranteeing sustainable forest management. However, most are focused exclusively or prevalently on natural or semi-natural forests, while only a few are specific to planted forests or plantations. Many differences can be identified among existing standards and guidelines that can be applied to planted forests and forest plantations. The paper, which main aim is to assess whether and to what extent planted forests are properly considered within the existing sets of standards/guidelines and to identify areas for improvements, is based on a series of comparative analysis. Both quantitative (number) and qualitative (quality in terms of coherency, consistency and completeness) aspects of indicators for addressing environmental, economic and social issues are considered. First, 42 standards/guidelines are classified and compared. Secondly, 3 standards for forest certification and 3 guidelines developed by international organisations are compared. Finally, a gap analysis is carried out with respect to an ad hoc “reference standard” with 386 indicators. Ball-charts, radar graphs and histograms are used to show results.

Keywords: Forest plantations; Planted forests; Forest management standards and guidelines; Comparison; Gap analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934114002366
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:53:y:2015:i:c:p:29-44

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2014.12.008

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().