Forests and Sustainability
The concept of sustainability is already more than 200 years old. It was originally developed with the objective to secure continuous supply of wood resources as an energy source to run industrial mills producing salt, glass or steel.
From this background the concept has been continuously developed by expanding the scope from the focus on wood production to cover multiple goods and services. Policy processes at the European level resulted with the Lisbon and Gothenborg agendas to explicitly include an economic, social and environmental dimension of sustainability. Lately, sustainability is no longer constrained to the resource management aspects, but it is now including also the complete forest value chains in the sustainability assessment.
Sustainability can be measured with indicators (see the following example of indicators that have been applied in preliminary analysis of Forestry-Wood Chain (FWC) sustainability in the EFORWOOD project).
EFI Activities on Forests and Sustainability
EFI’s aim is to maintain and develop tools and methodologies which enable international comparisons and future projections in strategic research issues. EFI is involved in several European scale projects developing models and tools for Sustainability Impact Assessment. These include e.g.
EFORWOOD – Tools for Sustainability Impact Assessment of Forestry-Wood Chain
SENSOR – Sustainability Impact Assessment: Tools for environmental, social and economic effects of multifunctional land use in European regions
EXIOPOL – A New
Environmental Accounting Framework Using Externality Data and
Input-Output Tools for Policy Analysis
EFIMED
Regional Office addressed the question of sustainability of the
Mediterranean forest ecosystems.