PRINCIPLES, CRITERIA AND INDICATORS FOR SUSTAINABILITY OF COMMERCIAL FOREST PLANTATIONS WITH FAST GROWING SPECIES

Abstract

An operational concept posed for sustainable development requires the utilization of principles, criteria and indicators (PCI) that should include environmental, social and economical issues for the management of forest resources. The commercial forest plantations are particular ecosystems that clearly differ from natural forests and require of particular PCI’s; in México these tools has not been developed yet. These PCI’s would be useful for developing specific sets for this particular type of projects. In order to obtain a generic group of PCI’s useful for commercial forest plantations, a multidisciplinary group of experts analyzed the criteria proposed by the Center for International Forestry Research, in order to rank them from 1 to 9, and also for rating them from 0 to 100 %. This analysis was supplemented by one workshop performed with persons of different academic disciplines. The information was analyzed and the result was a set of five principles, 25 criteria and 82 indicators which included environmental, economic, social, legal, institutional and planning issues. The resulting set might also be applied, in an emergent way, for a direct evaluation of sustainability in a particular commercial forestry plantation.