The main challenges of sustainable forest management in the Amazon: why sustainable forest management in the Amazon should be reinforced?

Since the last 50 years, tropical natural forests have been intensively logged in the tropics to supply the increasing demand of tropical timber. Unplanned logging operations caused forest degradation leading to their conversion due to the loss of their commercial value. Today, natural forests remain a major source of timber and tropical production forests worldwide are estimated to cover around 400 million ha Studies carried out on the long term impact of logging on timber yield showed that at best about only 50% of the timber volume extracted during the first harvest will be available for the subsequent cycles. We estimated the potential of natural production of the Amazonian forest to supply the future wood demand using more than 200 pem1anent plots for monitoring the long term response after logging of the TmFO network. Our results clearly show that natural forests alone will not be able to supply the increasing demand of tropical timber in the region and that significant efforts in forest restoration through plantations as well as intensive silvicultural practices such as enrichment planting in gaps and liberation, must be initiated immediately. Although natural forests will not be able to supply alone the timber market demand, they will play a major role in environmental services (including biodiversity protection and conservation, climate change mitigation rather than solely for timber provision while they will continue to provide necessary income to forest communities that depend on the forests for their livelihoods.