Bruno Manser Fonds
Heuberg 25
4051 Basel
Switzerland
phone +41 61 261 94 74
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updated 2001-01-31
February 2000
World Bank Decision
Quote from:
The Forest Sector - a World Bank-Policy-Paper
97 p, © 1991 The Word Bank, ISBN 0-8213-1917-5
The Bank will support initiatives to expand forest areas allocated as parks and reserves and to institute effective management and enforcement in new existing areas. In particular, the Bank will assist governments in protecting high-priority areas as identified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and by local conservation experts through the provision of support for the preparations and implementation of conservation plans. The Bank will stress new approaches to management of protected areas that incorporate local people. Experimental prograns to test alternative approaches to the participation of local people and to the promotion of nonwood products of natural forests to benefit such people will also be financed
No human being and no money can make a 1000 year old tree - only time!
In tropical moist forest, the Bank will adopt, and will encourage goverments to adopt, a precautionary policy toward utilisation. This policy is motivated by uncertainties regarding the full valuation of environmental services, the inadequacy of knowledge concerning sustainable management systems, and the irreversibilities associated with loss of tropical forests. Specifically, the Bank Group will not under any circumstances finance commercial logging in primary tropical moist forests. Financing of infrastructural projects (such as roads, dams and mines) that may lead to loss of tropical moist forests and other primary forests will be subject to rigorous environmental assessment as mandated by the Bank's operation guidelines for projects that raise diverse and significant environmental issues. A careful assessment of the social issues involved will also be required. The Bank will continue to place more emphasis on support to programs that involve institutional development, forest protection measures, and nonforest income-generating projects, the primary objectives of which will be the preservation of tropical moist forest. In implementing this strategy, the Bank will pay special attention in its forestry lending to the twenty countries (accounting for 85 percent of tropical moint forests) in which forests are seriously threatened by encroachment and destruction. In these countries special efforts will be made to support economic development in poor, densely populated areas around the forests or in the origin areas of forest encroachers. The Bank's efforts in forest conservation will also be directed toward ameliorating environmental damanage in temperate and boreal forests. Investments will be directed toward rehabilitaion and reforestation of degraded forest lands, coupled with support for programs to abate industrial pollution and conserve energy.