Summary

This project is an output of the pre-project PPD 93/04 (M) “Analysis of the Current Status and Development of a Project Proposal for the Strengthening of the Forest Statistical Information Centre in Honduras”.

The project is aimed at strengthening the FOREST STATISTICS AND INFORMATION CENTRE – CIEF of the National Forest Administration – Honduran Forest Development Corporation (AFE-COHDEFOR), through the establishment of an integrated forest statistics and information system that will increase the contribution and relevance of the forest sub-sector to the country’s social, economic and environmental development, while at the same time strengthening local, regional and institutional capacities. The project will standardise and integrate methodologies, procedures and instruments for the collection, storage, analysis and dissemination of information in the following thematic areas: Economic Development, Protected Areas and Wildlife, Social Forestry System, Forest and Environmental Protection, Technical Auditing, and Management & Administration. An integrated system is expected to be developed based on a forest statistical and spatial database with Windows and Web interfaces. Training will be provided for the personnel in charge of the establishment and operation of the system and for system users, on the basis of partnerships to be established between public and private institutions and professional/trade organisations. A technological platform will be established to support the system in information technology and telecommunication aspects.

Summary

Forest sector institutions in Guatemala, both at the government (regulation, control and incentives) and private (industrialisation and marketing) levels have to date made individual efforts to generate reliable information. Even though these efforts have been very significant, these are not consistent with a comprehensive policy that could provide statistical information at the national level. Thus, these individual efforts can resolve temporary internal problems within the respective institutions but are not based on a long-term vision and often produce conflictive information by applying different methods of data evaluation.

Against this backdrop, this project seeks to become a binding agent, identifying primary information-generating institutions in the country. The project will introduce state-of-the-art information technologies so that the regional units of the institutions in charge of forest control may have monitoring tools and adequate communications infrastructure available. These units report directly to their headquarters in the Capital of the Republic and currently rely, in many aspects, on the information generated by these central offices. Under this new scheme, the responsibility for forest management monitoring and control will be decentralised to these units, thus ensuring an expeditious information gathering process and appropriate processing of the information collected, as the situation varies from one region to the other. As a complement to data collection activities, statistical analysis tools will be developed to study the performance of forest activities through the harvesting, industrialization and marketing stages, making use of the quality information generated by the system. These tools will help improve the basis for decision and policy making in the forest sector. Furthermore, the data generation procedures of private agencies will be strengthened through their managing bodies so that these can actively participate in the production of reliable statistics at the national level.

This will ensure the achievement of the development objective i.e. "To contribute to the social and economic development of the country by providing timely, easy-to-access and reliable information on forest activities as the basis for the development of policies to promote national and foreign investments in the sector".

Summary

This project is designed to further develop the STATFOR computerised forest management/monitoring system developed in three earlier ITTO projects [PD 36/92 (M), PD 15/98 Rev.2 (M) and PD 56/00 Rev.3 (M)] and which is also being used in a large World Bank project currently under way in Gabon. The project will create a new module for STATFOR called TRANSFOR which will extend the bar-code monitoring system developed earlier for logs to processed products like sawnwood and veneer. This will assist the government in monitoring the movement of logs from felling to final product, thereby improving tax revenues and laying a foundation for the eventual certification of exported timber products.

Summary

This pre-project will: evaluate the present situation regarding capacities, human and material, and data collection, processing and analysis methods; propose a strategy for the implementation of an operational system able to provide forestry statistics on a permanent basis; organise a workshop for the dissemination and validation of the strategy; and formulate a project proposal for the enhancement of the national forestry statistics system.

Summary

This project, which awaits a small amount of funding, will develop a transparent forest monitoring system for the sustainable management of Congolese forests at the national and forest management unit levels. Outputs will include: high-resolution aerial digital imagery over southwestern Congo forests and concessions; digital images for tactical planning in forest management planning; a comparison of planned and actual harvest rates and forest charges valuation; a methodology for use by stakeholders in biodiversity monitoring and habitat assessment; the use of digital 3D imagery to monitor legal logging volumes, detect illegal logging and provide a transparent basis for revenue assessment; and training in all aspects of image capture, processing and interpretation.

Summary

As part of a program to document the 7,000 useful plants of tropical Africa arranged into 16 commodity groups, PROTA will make a synthesis of all existing but dispersed knowledge on the estimated 900 timbers of tropical Africa ('commodity group 7') in two parts. The first part will deal with the 350 'timbers of tropical Africa' from the more important timber-producing taxonomic families.

Summary

The project will establish a network to collect, process and disseminate data related to the forestry sector of India. The project will develop a set of formats in line with the formats of ITTO and other international agencies interested in the forestry operations of the world. A manual for implementation of the network will also be developed along with the required training courses for the field level investigators. The data processing and dissemination capabilities of ICFRE will be developed with an aim to minimize the response time to the demands of data by ITTO and other interested parties both at National and International level.

Summary

This pre-project aims to add transparency to the Democratic Republic of Congo's forest sector by developing an efficient forest statistics management system for data collection and processing. It will build on the outputs already achieved in this field with the support of the Central Africa Regional Program for Environment (CARPE) and USAID, undertaking activities such as an inventory of all data collection forms, liaison with and obtaining data from all other relevant organisations, analysis of these data, compilation of information on the statistical systems used by other countries and organizations, and preparation of a project proposal for the full-scale implementation of a forest statistics management system.

Summary

This project emphasised the collection and reporting of tropical forest products information separately in customs statistics and investigated the impact of the recently announced National Forest Protection Program on China’s demand for wood.

Summary

This is the final stage of a five-year project to establish a forestry statistical information system in Peru. It is extending the system to all regional nodes throughout Peru (currently,three nodes are operational) and linking all regional forestry offices electronically with INRENA's headquarters in Lima. It is also providing training for users and operators of the system.

Summary

This 20-month project aims to establish a permanent structure for statistics research and collection on timber marketing in Cameroon. At its completion, a well-established and long-lasting structure will centralise the country’s statistical data on timber marketing.

Summary

This project is building on the forest statistical information system developed under a previous ITTO project to improve the knowledge of forest products production and trade and assist efforts to increase the share of these products in the total exports of the country.

Summary

This project is developing two computer modules to be integrated into Gabon's Forest Statistics Information & Management System (STATFOR).

Summary

The existing forest information systems in Guatemala are dispersed and poorly equipped to produce an integrated, complete and up-to-date database as required by the different sectoral and inter-sectoral stakeholders at the national and international levels.The objective of this pre-project is to formulate a project proposal for the articulation and implementation of a forest information system in Guatemala. The specific objectives are:

• to update the diagnosis of the first-level forest information systems already existing in Guatemala;
  
• to design the institutional integration module to generate forest information and forest statistics; and
  
• to develop a project proposal for a national forest information system.

Summary

This project is establishing a sustainable forest management information system (SIMFOS) to provide information and specialised tools and to facilitate the exchange of experiences among key forest-sector stakeholders in the region. With the support of Amazonian universities and regional cooperation groups, the project is also providing training on sustainable forest management to 60 leaders.

Summary

This pre-project is compiling existing integrated forest management models in China based on an intensive survey and carrying out a diagnosis of local potentials and environmental constraints. Among the main outputs will be a report on the current status of the tropical forest zones in China and a project proposal.

Summary

This project is developing and establishing a fully operational forestry and timber statistical data collection, processing and dissemination system, managed by local personnel and enabling the development of a permanent data bank, which will serve as an operational control panel for rational decision-making in sustainable forest management.