Final Thoughts

Abstract

This chapter draws some overarching observations from what has gone before in this book, framed in the context of a more general paradigm linking social, cultural and environmental change. We follow some new work on these large issues which suggests that creating institutions to meet the challenge of sustainability is the most critical task confronting society; these institutions will need to be capable of integrating the various ecological, economic and social disciplines in a way that will allow continual adaptation to cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring and renewal.

We suggest that in this new era, the primary reason for slowing global deforestation is that without this, there will be little chance of bringing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases down to the levels needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. Dealing effectively with life in the Anthropocene is going to involve assigning high global priority to getting this done – especially for the tropical rainforests much more effectively than we have managed to do so far. In this sense, the forest carbon product – combined with a broader set of forest ecosystem values – represents a new opportunity; one which has the potential to fundamentally re-order the economic priorities of forest management and use at a global scale. We will need to see this for what it is – a market opportunity.

The crux of what needs to be done is to more effectively link finance and capital – those creations of the last renaissance which have powered both the best and the worst of our historical trajectory since then – to the natural forest systems, and ongoing human interactions with those systems, to shift the dynamic towards sustainability. Inevitably, we believe, this will require a much larger role for international private sector investment than has hitherto been the case.

This approach may raise concerns in some quarters, related to the role of international donor assistance institutions, the perceived need to protect biodiversity as a goal in itself, and addressing equity and rights issues as a priority. We acknowledge these concerns, but we maintain the argument that has underlain much of what has been written in this book: more compromise, and changes in approach are going to be necessary. Many of the criticisms we have raised of historical efforts of the international forests constituency to implement forest sustainability and reduced deforestation in the past – inconsistency and lack of coordination, inadequate financing, and the pursuit of ideological and unrealistic solutions – will remain as constraints under a new approach to this problem, unless there is new resolve on the part of all significant players to not allow the perfect to continue to get in the way of the good.