Q-25 years after the Rio de Janeiro conference: what has been the contribution of global forest policy to non-forest processes

Abstract

The most important degradation processes which affect natural ecosystems recognized since the Rio de Janeiro conference (1992) are climate change, biodiversity degradation, soil desertification and deforestation, especially in relation to primary forest ecosystems.

In these 25 years many sectoral policies have been defined and a long list of aims has been produced and actions have been implemented in order to enforce global sustainable development. The expectation is currently that the general condition of forest ecosystems and the contribution that these have made to sustainable development will have improved since the conference.

Analyzing text in the main documents produced by global forest and non-forest institutions and statistical databases relating to the performance of various actions, the author implemented concordance and discordance analysis. The results were categorized as efficient, indifferent or as having regressive effects.

The conclusion describes some improvement and change in the actions for increasing efficiency, especially where regressive effects were registered.