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Local Level Indicators > History

The need for criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management (SFM) became an international priority following the 1992 UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro. At that conference, the international community recognized that putting the principle of sustainable development into practice is no easy task, especially in the field of forests and forest management where there are a bewildering number of variations of ecosystem types, economic conditions, social expectations and institutional capacity around the world.

Since the UNCED conference, there has been a growing number of initiatives aimed at identifying criteria and indicators of SFM. In 1994, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM) convened a process to develop criteria and indicators of SFM that would be consistent with relevant international frameworks, but adapted so as to make them more relevant to the Canadian context. After extensive discussions with a wide variety of interests, the CCFM approved a set of six criteria, with more than eighty national-level indicators.

C&I and Local Level Indicators
Much of the initial interest in criteria and indicators (C&I) arose from a need to report both nationally and internationally on progress made towards SFM. However, it soon became apparent that the ability to demonstrate national advancement towards SFM rests largely with actions that are carried out at the local level. The need for local level indicators arose not just out of a “top-down” imposition of a particular framework, but because “bottom-up” reporting is absolutely essential to the whole effort of demonstrating progress at any scale.

Beginning in 1996, discussion about C&I increasingly focussed on the need for effective local level indicators of SFM. The term “local” in this context can be used to refer to areas as small as a particular forest stand, but for the most part “local level indicators” refer to indicators that apply across a particular forest management unit. This might range in scale from a few dozen hectares for a private woodlot, all the way up to regions over one million hectares in size.

The national and international policy community, which had initiated discussion on C&I in the first place, recognized the importance of good local level reporting, but had to look to others for the expertise to actually design and implement local level indicators of SFM.

Model Forests and Local Level Indicators
Model Forests offered a number of attractive features that made the Canadian Model Forest Network (CMFN) ideally suited to help in the development and use of local level indicators. Model Forests operate at an appropriate scale of operations, are distributed across Canada’s forest regions, and represent a diversity of partnerships and perspectives. In 1997, the CMFN began a local level indicator initiative that encompassed activities carried out by individual Model Forests and the CMFN as a whole. The result was the development of suites of local level indicators at each of the Model Forests and the publication of a major “how-to” manual (User’s Guide to Local Level Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management: Experiences from the Canadian Model Forest Network) based on work completed from 1997-2000.

Since then, several Model Forests have revised and fine-tuned their original set of local level indicators and have reported on progress made against the indicators. The CMFN also developed an electronic database to house the indicators, making this information more accessible to the public and facilitating updates to the local level indicator data.

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