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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 Chapter 3: Benefits from
the forest
Gary Q. Bull Associate Professor and Steven Northway, Research Scientist
Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T
1Z4
This chapter covers the many tangible and intangible benefits that come from forests. It
considers first industrial products, such as sawn timber, panels and paper, and then looks at
fuelwood, a product that is often overlooked by policy-makers and planners but is of (literally)
vital importance for the provision of domestic energy in developing countries – and is becoming
more important as a source of renewable energy in developed economies. Next the chapter
briefly reviews non-wood forest products – like fuelwood, largely ignored in national accounts,
but often of major importance to the livelihoods of rural people in developing countries, and,
again like fuelwood, of increasing importance in developed countries. Finally, this chapter
considers the intangible benefits – the environmental services that forests provide, such as
watershed control, protection of farmland and livestock from the effects of weather, or the
sequestration of carbon, and the social and cultural benefits that accrue from the production of
goods and services.
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