Making forest concessions in the tropics work to achieve the 2030 Agenda: Voluntary Guidelines

The importance of forests in helping to achieve global sustainable development has been largely acknowledged by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement. In order to ensure that forests deliver their socio-economic and environmental benefits, it is crucial to expand sustainable forest management (SFM) based on the best available practices. Although some progress towards SFM has been noted, the global proportion of land area covered by forests continues to decline. Loss of forests has mainly occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, while many countries in Asia and the Pacific are still sustaining significant deforestation and forest degradation. Forest concessions are not used uniformly across regions, or even across all tropical regions. In some countries, forest concessions overlap with land concessions and are used as land allocation or land management instruments, with objectives other than those of sustainable forest management. The proposed Voluntary Guidelines focus on promoting SFM in concessions of public natural production forests in tropical regions.