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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 History
The British Forestry Commission was established in 1919, adopting many of the practices
already developed in India, including the creation of research units within the forest service.
Since Great Britain, and England in particular, was, and still is, very substantially deforested,
research was largely focussed from the beginning on support to the national policy of creating
a national strategic resource of mining timber. After the Second World War, emphasis
gradually shifted to concerns related to the financial viability of tree growing, and subsequently
to environmental and social benefits. The Forestry Departments of the four universities of
Aberdeen, Bangor, Edinburgh, and Oxford carried out research mainly on British priorities but
also on overseas subjects. A number of research institutions were set up specifically to
address needs for research for the developing countries of the then empire, and several of
these such as the Colonial Pesticides Research Unit in Tanzania and the Imperial College of
Tropical Agriculture, Trinidad were located in the developing countries themselves. The
Imperial Forestry Institute was set up at Oxford University, which, in its role as the
Commonwealth Forestry Institute, played a leading role on tropical forest research on a broad
range of subjects. Major herbaria, timber research laboratories, pest and biological control
research laboratories and specialised university departments were also established. The latter
have been particularly adept at keeping in the forefront of socio-economic research needs.
However, since the 1990s there seems to have been a steady decline in forestry research
especially on tropical forestry.
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