Past, present and future of accounting for the forest and the forestry: an overview of French experience
Résumé
Context: Forests provide a wide range of goods and services. Monitoring this renewable resource and all the outputs related is necessary to ensure forest sustainable management. Due to the complexity of the forest sector, a suitable accounting for forests is necessary to consider all costs and benefits. Improvements of forest accounting methods at international level over the last decades have to be continued. Aims: This paper attempts to share the French experience in order to promote forest accounts, and strategic and methodological discussions around forestry statistics. Working on forest accounts should lead to a better harmonization and a lightening of reporting burden while facilitating the use of relevant indicators. Methods: We remind the history of forests accounts and then we present some worthwhile methodological points of the French forest accounting work. Results: We would like to emphasize the difficulties of implementation and the importance of consistency between all statistic processes. Conclusion: We underline in this paper that in order to play a significant role as tool for inducing movement towards ecologically, economically and socially sound policy making, forest resource accounting needs for a shift in ways of thinking, claims for further multidisciplinary research in particular in the field of non productive ecosystem services and requires active promotion by powerful actors and international institutions.