Plantation forests often have a negative image. They are typically assumed to be poor substitutes for natural forests, particularly in terms of biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, provision of clean drinking water and other non-timber goods and services. Often they are monocultures that do not appear to invite people for recreation and other direct uses. Yet as this book clearly shows, they can play a vital role in the provision of ecosystem services, when compared to agriculture and other forms of land use or when natural forests have been degraded. This is the first book to examine explicitly the non-timber goods and services provided by plantation forests, including soil, water and biodiversity conservation, as well as carbon sequestration and the provision of local livelihoods. The authors show that, if we require a higher provision of ecosystem goods and services from both temperate and tropical plantations, new approaches to their management are required. These include policies, methods for valuing the services, the practices of small landholders, landscape approaches to optimise delivery of goods and services, and technical issues about how to achieve suitable solutions at the scale of forest stands. While providing original theoretical insights, the book also gives guidance for plantation managers, policy-makers, conservation practitioners and community advocates, who seek to promote or strengthen the multiple-use of forest plantations for improved benefits for society. Published with CIFOR

A brief history of plantations. Environmental issues. Plantations and biodiversity. Water matters. Plantations and the soil. Pests: plantations' achilles' heel? Genetically modified trees: opportunity or treath? Plantations and global warming. Social issues. Employement: a contested balance sheet. Land tenure and conflict. Economic issues. Spiralling demand. Incentives and subsidies. Economies of scale. Costing the earth.

1 Plantation forests and biodiversity: Oxymoron or opportunity? Forests form the natural vegetation over much of the Earth’s land, and they are critical for the survival of innumerable organisms. The ongoing loss of natural forests, which in some regions may have taken many millennia to develop, is one of the main reasons for the decline of biodiversity. Preventing the further destruction of forests and protecting species and ecosystems within forests have become central issues for environmental agencies, forest managers, and gove- ments. In this di?cult task science has an important role in informing policy and management as to how to go about this. So how do industrial and other pl- tation forests ?t into this? Plantation forests, comprised of rows of planted trees that may be destined for pulp or sawmills after only a few years of growth, appear to have little to c- tribute to the conservation of biodiversity. Yet there is more to this than meets the eye (of the casual observer), and there are indeed numerous opportunities, and often untapped potential, for biodiversity conservation in plantation forestry. With plantation forests expanding at a rate of approximately three million hectares per year, it is crucial to understand how plantations can make a positive contribution to biodiversity conservation and how the potentially negative impacts of this land use can be minimised. That is the topic of this book.

Over the last two decades, the topic of forest ecosystem services has attracted the attention of researchers, land managers, and policy makers around the globe. The services rendered by forest ecosystems range from intrinsic to anthropocentric benefits that are typically grouped as provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural. The research efforts, assessments, and attempts to manage forest ecosystems for their sustained services are now widely published in scientific literature. This volume focuses on broad-scale aspects of forest ecosystem services, beyond individual stands to large landscapes. In doing so, it illustrates the conceptual and practical opportunities as well as challenges involved with planning for forest ecosystem services across landscapes, regions, and nations. The goal here is to broaden the scope of land use planning through the adoption of a landscape-scale approach. Even though this approach is complex and involves multiple ecological, social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions, the landscape perspective appears to offer the best opportunity for a sustained provision of forest ecosystem services.

Bamboo is well known for supporting people’s livelihoods, and is widely used in landscape restoration programs while providing a wide range of ecosystem goods and services. However, while marketable goods from bamboo such as shoots for food and timber for construction, flooring and furniture are well known, the ecosystem services (ES) supply from bamboo is not, due to limited research. To date, very few studies highlight the role of bamboo forests in providing multiple ES that have local and global value. Lack of an appropriate framework and tools is considered a barrier to assessing the ES from bamboo forests. Therefore, this study attempts to develop an easy-to-apply framework to assess ES from bamboo and test them in three countries in Asia and Africa – Nepal, Indonesia and Ethiopia – in order to understand the relative supply capacity of the key ES from bamboo forests. The literature related to ES and assessment frameworks was reviewed so as to design an appropriate assessment framework for bamboo forests. This study offers an easy-to-apply framework that can be used widely. The research shows that the ES supply capacity of bamboo forests is higher than for industrial planted forest while it is lower than for the natural forests in all case study sites. The ES assessment from bamboo forests poses several challenges: defining and classifying ES, limited data, and complex relationships in trade-offs and synergies of ES that should be kept in mind while designing the framework.

This volume, with contributions from leading international experts, reports on the need to produce high quality food whilst satisfying environmental concerns. Including material on natural products, modes of action and metabolism, it covers all the key areas in pesticide chemistry and related activities. The contents outline the developments that have taken place in approaches to crop protection and our ability to develop complex, environmentally acceptable strategies for weed, pest and disease control.

A global assessment of potential and anticipated impacts of efforts to achieve the SDGs on forests and related socio-economic systems. This title is available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.