A major challenge in trading ecosystem services is the need to quantify and commoditise services, for monitoring and verification as well as for trade. This is relatively straightforward for goods such as forest honey or shade-grown coffee, but potentially complex for services such as water purification, reducing risk from floods or other disasters or carbon sequestration. Developing certification systems for forest ecosystem services is one potential way to define, quantify and verify these services in a way that buyers can trust, and this is why certification of ecosystem services is promoted by a number of environmental and forestry NGOs. Certification of ecosystem services is a useful concept, but many practical and theoretical obstacles must be addressed before it can be put into practice. This paper is a review of existing development in certification of ecosystem services, with information useful for designing and implementing projects to evaluate the efficacy of new systems. We discuss the potential use of more holistic concepts for measuring management sustainability, which are to date undeveloped and untested, and recommend developing pilot projects that are specifically designed to address a number of challenges inherent to ecosystem service certification.

Ecosystem services and goods are the multiple benefits people obtain from ecosystems. The benefits provided by forests include carbon sequestration, prevention of erosion, flood control, and water purification as well as aesthetic beauty. Although humans are fundamentally dependent on these services, they also pose threat to the services through their activities such as deforestation and water pollution.

We investigated the production and trade in rattan along the supply chain. We focused our study on Indonesia, the global leader in natural rattan production, and more specifically, West Kutai in East Kalimantan. Our analysis of local livelihoods in 2004 and 2011 indicates that communities have abandoned rattan as their main source of income, primarily because of low rattan farm-gate prices. Our interviews and econometric analysis indicate that rattan prices are kept artificially low through price fixing within a cartel of rattan traders. Farm-gate prices are also kept low by export quotas. The result has been a substantial reduction in export volumes of Indonesian rattan products (as opposed to unprocessed and semi-processed rattan). Other contributing factors include reduced overseas demand, the relative strength of the rupiah and the loss of Indonesia’s competitive edge over other countries. Compared to its competitors, Indonesia has higher transaction costs, including taxes, tariffs, administrative costs and transportation costs. We conclude that a lack of reliable data on rattan resources and unstable policy have hampered efforts to develop sustainable management strategies and annual allowable harvest volumes. We recommend the development of a national rattan action plan, based on reliable scientific data. This would require more accurate information on rattan trade, future development in the rattan products market, production capacity in forests and planted rattan gardens, and international trade, including illegal trade. Such information could guide rattan policies, specifically determining what trade legislation would have the best macro and microeconomic results for Indonesia.

Buku ini berisi kajian teknis mengenai informasi ekologis dan kehidupan serangkaian spesies satwa liar Borneo. Kajian ini ditujukan untuk mengidentifikasi penyebab berbagai spesies satwa peka terhadap kegiatan penebangan kayu dan dampak yang ditimbulkannya. Buku ini ditujukan bagi mereka yang: 1) terlibat dalam pengkajian dan pengaturan kegiatan pemanenan kayu di Asia Tenggara, 2) terlibat dalam upaya pencapaian tujuan konservasi di wilayah ini, dan 3) melakukan penelitian untuk meningkatkan kualitas pengelolaan hutan yang multifungsi. Kami menunjukkan bahwa pengelolaan hutan dapat ditingkatkan dengan berbagai cara sederhana untuk menyelaraskan tujuan pemanenan kayu dan konservasi hidupan liar. Rekomendasi yang disampaikan dapat bermanfaat bagi lembaga-lembaga pemerintah dan organisasi nonpemerintah yang berupaya untuk memajukan pengelolaan hutan yang berkelanjutan dan ekolabel. Untuk itu kami mengidentifikasi sejumlah kelemahan dan celah dari pemahaman dan pengetahuan yang ada, dan selanjutnya kami berharap dapat menarik minat masyarakat ilmiah dan memicu penelitian lebih lanjut.