United Nations Forum on Forests to Meet at Geneva
8/21/98
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: United Nations Forum on Forests to Meet at Geneva
Source: CNN
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 8/21/98
UNITED NATIONS (Aug. 21) XINHUA - Measures to slow deforestation are on
the agenda for the first substantive session of the Intergovernmental
Forum on Forests to be opened in Geneva next Monday, it was announced here
Friday.
The session, to end on September 4, will also include background talks on
possible elements of a legal agreement, said the U.N. Department of Public
Information.
Despite significant progress since the Earth Summit in 1992 in improving
national forest planning and increasing international coordination,
statistics still paint a disturbing picture of continued deforestation.
The world lost an average of 11.3 million ha of net forest area annually,
roughly the size of Honduras, between 1991 and 1995, according to U.N.
figures.
Most of this loss took place in tropical forests, which lost 12.36 million
ha a year, offset slightly by planting of forest plantations in other
regions.
Destruction of rain forests has continued almost unabated since the 1980s,
when the average annual loss of tropical forests was 12.8 million ha.
Just a few countries, such as Bolivia, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Mexico, Venezuela and Zaire, accounted for 50 percent of the tropical
forest loss in 1991-1995.
A U.N. intergovernmental panel on forests created in 1995 went a long way
toward building international consensus in 1997 when governments agreed on
over 135 proposals for action aimed at sustainable forest management.
The proposals are seen as effective guidelines for national policy and a
U.N. report prepared for the session calls for political support for
implementation and increased financial assistance to developing countries.
The will review the impact of existing legal agreements an international
work on forests. It will be followed by discussions planned for May 1999
on identifying the possible elements of internaitonal arrangements, such
as a forest convention.