06-07-2017 - When the owner of a forest agrees to give another entity the right to manage a forest area for production or other uses, the resulting agreement is known as a forest concession. Such an agreement not only gives rights to the operator but also makes them accountable for the impacts of their management practices.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Brazilian Forest Service, the Center for International Forestry Research and the Centre de Coopération International en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement have launched an initiative to:
explore perspectives of tropical forest concessions as instruments to mainstream best practices of sustainable forest management and enlarged forest contribution to socioeconomic development, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration; and
assess and promote alternative models to (traditional) concession systems that effectively respond to the needs of local peoples, while ensuring the economic and financial feasibility of sustainable forest management.
This initiative is also relevant for a number of ongoing processes, such as the strategies and action plans for reducing deforestation and forest degradation, promote sustainable forest management for private investments, and to assess the potential for private and public policy instruments – i.e. certification, fiscal instruments, and competitive and transparent bidding - to improve forest contracts as well as other allocation models.