Forestry Investment Blog

From 1983 up until a few years ago the Bhutanese bragged about having over 72.5% of its land under forest cover. It wasn’t until 2005 that the forestry department’s updated figure showed that figure to have suddenly dropped to 64.35% and in the process causing a few eyebrows to rise during their annual forestry conference.

The fear is that in today’s climate with the country geared towards unprecedented development activities that figure could drop further. National land commission officials warn that although the country’s supreme law means that the people must maintain 60% forest cover on their land there is insufficient data to accurately predict how much forest cover there is currently.

“There is no clear definition of forest, whether it included both government and private forests,” an official said.

Because of this they have drafted a land policy that proposes the creation of a new agency specifically responsible for strictly protecting, monitoring and maintaining the 60% forest cover.

“We need to identify an agency that would use technical support, like computer system and geo-information system (GIS), to analyse accurate percentage,” another land commission official said.

Based on the agriculture ministry’s pre-investment survey done in the late 1970s forestry and park services official said the country said the country needed to maintain a 60% forest cover. As ground realities constantly changed the policy also said that there should be a process of reviewing and reassessing the coverage on a regular basis.

“With increasing development activities, most forest land is affected,” the chief survey engineer Dorji Tshering said.

In the meantime to help them capture comprehensive data on the forest and its resources the forest resources development is planning a national forest inventory (NFI) project.

“It will give accurate information on forest-covered land, species, herbs, wildlife, shrubs, barren land and different information related to forest,” forestry officials said. “Altogether they comprise 72.5% of the country’s total land area.”

Kinley Tshering the chief forestry officer said that in order to compile an inventory that will identify the exact forest coverage they would measure more than 26,000 plots across the country by dividing them into grids and using GIS. This pilot project was carried out last year in Toebesa, Punakha to determine the project’s feasibility, which proved successful.

“We’ll use GIS, remote sensing and satellite images before we actually implement NFI,” Kinley Tshering said. “We hope to do that within the next six years.”

For more information on forestry investments please click here

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 8:22 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.