Is increasing environmental awareness adding market value to Native forests?

GOWDA, J.H.

Tartu

Conferencia; IUFRO Landscape Ecology Conference; 2015

IUFRO

During the last four decades, increasing environmental awareness has led to fundamental changes in forest legislation, management and education, as well as to increasing market regulations for forest products. Today, most countries explicitly include sustainable management and conservation in forest practices, forestry faculties have modified their curricula to adapt to this new demand from society, and non-governmental certification systems such as FSC are required for tropical forest products entering Europe and North America as well as for investment portfolios that include any tropical forest. Parallel to this trend, forest investments in emerging countries target forest plantations, whereas native forest management is increasingly difficult to fund.In this presentation, I explore some examples of current investments in native forests to evaluate whether the perceived environmental value of native forests is related to their market value. I propose that, in emerging countries, increasing awareness of the environmental services provided by native forests may often lead to a reduction of their market value, present some ideas on how to change this trend, and open for a general discussion regarding the role of researchers in this process.