Forest sustainability and the social context: Applying the montreal process criteria and indicators

Abstract

Criteria and indicators (C&I) are increasingly being used to gauge sustainability in various contexts. The common approach is to arrange a set of indicators under several overarching criteria, usually spanning ecological, social, and economic dimensions. In this way, social and economic elements are explicitly recognized as crucial to the challenge of assuring sustainability. In theory, after populating the indicators with appropriate information, the C&I set is then evaluated relative to established benchmarks for each indicator. In practice, however, the task of setting agreed upon benchmarks is often set aside owing to a lack of consensus or conceptual difficulties in deriving a quantified measure of sustainability within the context of a single indicator or set of indicators. These difficulties can be especially pronounced in the case of socioeconomic measures where a high degree of dynamism and a confusion between sustainable outcomes and desired outcomes can predominate. In these cases, the C&I can serve as an input to broader public debate about sustainability, falling short of the explicit determination of sustainability for which the C&I may have been designed but still serving a valuable function through its ability to organize and communicate vital information in an interdisciplinary context. This chapter will explore these issues, using the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators for Forest Sustainability and its associated US National Report on Sustainable Forests as a real-world case study. It will focus on questions of interpreting the sustainability of key socioeconomic indicators and their relationship to biophysical indicators as well as the overarching process through which society can determine sustainability of forested ecosystems in light of the varied and often contradictory information forest sustainability reporting presents.