A More Realistic Portrayal of Tropical Forestry: Response to Kormos and Zimmerman

• Published in: Conservation letters Vol. 7; no. 2; pp. 145 - 146
• Main Authors: Putz, Francis E., Zuidema, Pieter A., Synnott, Timothy, Peña-Claros, Marielos, Pinard, Michelle A., Sheil, Douglas, Vanclay, Jerome K., Sist, Plinio, Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie, Palmer, John, Zagt, Roderick, Griscom, Bronson
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.03.2014; John Wiley & Sons, Inc
• Subjects: Biodiversity conservation; Carbon; conservation; forest certification; Forest management; Forestry; Logging; REDD; reduced-impact logging; Riparian buffers; Timber; Tropical forests
• ISSN: 1755-263X; 1755-263X
• DOI: 10.1111/conl.12044

K&Z disregard the contributions of groups like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Tropical Forest Foundation, the Borneo Initiative, and the various environmental and social welfare groups that are helping to develop ways to compensate companies and communities for the costs of retaining more carbon in living trees through REDD+ and other mechanisms. Furthermore, while governance failures still occur far too frequently, steady increase in the area of natural tropical forest certified as responsibly managed by the FSC (now >13 million hectares) provides evidence that forest owners are increasingly able to protect and manage their resources. [...]given that wood is one of the lowest carbon‐footprint structural materials (Perez‐Garcia et al. ), banning industrial logging would have some perverse environmental outcomes.