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Peer Review

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Notes

The primary purpose of this workshop was to bring together national stakeholders in India, with international collaborators from countries participating in the Global Canopy Programme, to raise awareness of the importance of forest canopies in the maintenance of local and global biodiversity, their interactions with the atmosphere and the benefits they provide to humanity. The forest canopy is the least known, richest and most threatened habitat on the earth’s surface. In many countries, its significance in supporting 40% of global biodiversity is unknown, and its role in maintaining earth’s atmosphere, through feedback mechanisms into carbon and water cycle, is poorly understood.

The secondary purpose was to develop strategies for quantifying the economic value of forest canopy ecosystem services and strategies for estimating the potential value of canopy ecotourism and canopy farming projects to provide sustainable livelihoods within India and the other participating countries. Similarly to canopy ecosystem services, the concepts of canopy ecotourism and canopy farming are new to many countries, including in India, but in some, such as Costa Rica, canopy ecotourism is growing rapidly and canopy farming has been tested in Mexico.

The third aim was to enable a South-South exchange among all international countries present at the workshop for the transfer of expertise and knowledge with a special focus on sustainable development and forest canopies. This was done in the context of the 2nd meeting of the International Steering Committee of the GCP WFO project in collaboration with UNEP.

Benefits forests provide to local livelihoods in the form of timber, fuelwood or NTFPs have been well quantified and valued but the ecosystem services their canopies provide in the form of rain, water vapour, carbon storage and sequestration, and biodiversity have not been either fully quantified scientifically or economically and are generally taken for granted. International understanding of these services is poor. Climate change impacts at local to global scales is likely to alter forest function and distribution affecting national parks, protected areas and the species they harbour and also local livelihoods dependent upon forests and the services they provide, directly or indirectly. The workshop raised awareness of the potential impacts through a number of presentations and considered potential management options for the future.

It is hoped that the strategies developed during the workshop will be implemented in the GCP/UNEP project, “Whole Forest Observatories: an international network to monitor forest canopy biodiversity and global climate change”. The PDFB ‘design phase’ of this GEF funded project is due to start in 2007 and the Full Scale Project (FSP) in 2008.