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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 The ecosystem approach
The idea of sustainable forest management, long familiar to foresters in terms of wood
production, was expanded to include all goods and services and the need for the involvement of
stakeholders following UNCED in 1992. A more recent concept has been the ecosystem
approach, which developed from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which addresses
the management of biological diversity in a range of ecosystems. An examination of the two
concepts (Løyche Wilkie et al. 2003) concluded that although they evolved separately (the
former from UNCED, the latter from the meetings of parties to the CBD) both aim at “promoting
conservation and management practices which are environmentally, socially and economically
sustainable and which generate and maintain benefits for both present and future generations.”
Furthermore “The few conceptual differences between the two sets of principles [which guide
the two approaches] stem from different starting points (production forests and forest
management versus conservation ecology) but are minimal for practical purposes.”
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