Hearings
About the WCFSD
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The Commission's hearings revealed an increasing consciousness among citizens of the public trust in forests. More people are becoming motivated towards instilling moral responsibility and ethical stewardship in forest management. The Commission wants to capitalize on this rise of concern for forests. It calls for new and different kinds of mechanisms that would accommodate an active involvement of local communities in decisions on forests and restore in government their sense of duty and responsibility to secure the public interest.
Thus the Commission proposes the concept of ForesTrust, a citizens' force envisaged as a set of global, national and local level arrangements to involve people from all parts of the world in solving the forest crisis.
As a first step the Commission wants to establish ForesTrust International (FTI) which will serve as an international consultative forum on forest issues. FTI will be a vehicle for dialogue on equal terms between governments, industry and civil society, and for keeping forest issues high on the international agenda.
FTI also would foster the establishment of national counterparts and work with them to pursue at the national level what the international body intends to achieve globally. ForesTrust at the local level will permit people to exercise their right of oversight about how their forests are being managed.
ForesTrust is envisaged to have four components described in more detail on these pages.
The Forest Watch concept is about getting the public involved in monitoring their forests. Forest Watch is expected to complement forest related information available from government sources and satellite imagery.
Forest Watch is envisaged as:
Forest Watch will be a challenge to mismanagement and corrupt activities related to forests. It would also allow communities to be vigilant about other development policies with a negative impact on forests.
Forest Award is envisaged as a mechanism for recognizing and rewarding good performance in conservation and sustainable forest management by communities, corporations and countries.
It will rely on information collected via the other ForesTrust functions, and from other sources. The international Forest Award committee would be comprised of representatives from the major forest related stakeholder groups.
Forest Award committees at the national level will make nominations to the international Forest Award committee.
The international Forest Ombudsman would be an innovation among international institutions. It would pass authoritative judgments focused on issues of discrimination, abuse of the forest resource, inequity, and corruption associated with forest operations. Information on these concerns would be provided by Forest Watch and other sources.
Two models could be considered for establishing the international Forest Ombudsman: an independent UN body, similar to the Human Rights Committee; or a creation of international NGOs involved in forest conservation.
The Forest Ombudsman at the national level is expected to perform similar tasks and would be modeled on existing ombudsman functions in other areas. Well-respected prominent citizens would be expected to guide and lead the national institutions. The international Forest Ombudsman will draw from the work of its national counterparts.
The Commission concluded that there is a need for coordinating criteria and indicators (c&i), certification standards and labeling initiatives.
It proposes a Forest Management Council (FMC) with objectives to:
Forest Management Council at the national level would monitor sustainable forest management standards within individual countries. They are expected to support the efforts of buyers' groups and consumer organizations to increase the market share for sustainably produced forest products.