Forests in Asia play a critical role in providing a variety of services that millions of people depend upon. They provide food, building materials, medicinal plants and fuel wood. They supply timber for domestic and export markets, protect soils from erosion, play an important role in recycling and distributing freshwater, and lock up significant quantities of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. They also contain much of our regional biodiversity. Despite their intrinsic and societal values, natural forests in Asia continue to disappear at alarmingly high rates. Securing the sustainable management of forests is one of the most urgent tasks facing us today. The Asia Forest Partnership (AFP) was launched in August 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) as a Type II partnership for sustainable development. The common aim of these partnerships is the implementation of sustainable development based on the Rio Declaration principles and the values expressed in the Millennium Declaration. As a partnership forum, AFP set itself the task of information sharing, dialogue and joint action to promote sustainable forest management. The initial duration of AFP was set at five years from 2002 to 2007. At the 7th Meeting of the Asia Forest Partnership, November 12-14, 2007, Yokohama, Japan, Partners agreed to an eight-year second phase (2008-2015). 

 

Why the AFP?

The approach of partnerships is a new concept to problem solving, compared to a rather traditional government-centred approach. The strength of partnerships is that by applying a partnership approach it is possible to combine ideas, skills, knowledge and the resources of organisations and individuals to deliver outputs that exceed the cumulative outputs of individual actors working alone.  AFP can enhance the efforts of individual forest stakeholders to promote Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) by bringing them together in a regional forum for information sharing, dialogue and joint action, characterised by openness, equality of rights, and a low level of formality. It appears increasingly clear that governments and official inter-governmental bodies do not have the capacity to address the SFM challenge in the region by themselves. Multi-stakeholder partnerships like AFP are an essential complement to official processes, and can pay an important role in mobilizing and strengthening those official processes. With a significant trend towards increased membership, the AFP has considerable potential to facilitate action towards SFM from local to international levels 

 

Why join?

AFP has grown into an important regional multistakeholder forum for sharing information and facilitating informal dialogue on priority – and sometimes politically sensitive – forest issues. No other forum currently fulfils these important purposes. Strengths of the AFP are ease of entry and exit, flexibility, breadth of subject matter, lightweight bureaucracy, voluntary commitments and equality of rights. An independent review of the Partnership found that partners identified the benefits of membership as: obtained new knowledge; enhanced influence; took advantage of each other’s strengths; increased legitimacy.[1] Outcomes of AFP identified by the review included: information exchange; networking; and collaborative work addressing common problems and leading to forest governance goals and raising the political profile of issues such as SFM.  

 

Goal

The goal of AFP is to: Promote cooperation and catalyze action among governments, civil society and business to achieve sustainable forest management in Asia and the Pacific and thereby maintain and enhance the provision of forest products and ecosystem services, and their contribution to human well-being. 

 

Key themes and emerging issues

AFP focuses on key themes and emerging issues that are of concern to its Partners. These include: 

Core functions

AFP’s core functions are to facilitate and promote: 

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