The Growing Mandate of Forest Inventories

Abstract

This introductory Chapter describes briefly the rapid emergence of new genera of problems, like climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, etc., not much heard of say 40 years back. These problems are not only conceptually complex, but international in scope, calling for consistent information at national, regional and global levels in form of a time series. This poses a problem to tropical countries as many of them lack institutional capacity as well as financial resources to collect and provide information. Techniques and technology are advancing fast to ameliorate the situation, but in turn, they also create problems for continuity and compatibility of national/global assessments. The twin issues, viz. strategy for national/global forest assessments and strategy for country capacity development for the purpose, are the main concerns of the book.