Contribution by France Nature Environnement (FNE) to the debate on sustainable management and indicators for reporting purposes; [Contribution de France Nature Environnement (FNE) au débat sur la gestion durable et des indicateurs pour en rendre compte]

By maintaining the wooded environment and regular, planned production of wood, foresters are involved in a longstanding, everyday practise of sustainable development. Gradually and increasingly, they have taken on board other functions since the end of the 19th century such as general public use, protection of water and soils and of biodiversity in general. The requirement - a recent one in the history of forestry - of producing several sustainable management indicators raises two questions. Are ciphered indicators, however many, able to translate the biological complexity of forest ecosystems and of the implications of multifunctionality? How can these indicators useful for the interaction between players? Initial feedback from experience using these sustainable forest management indicators shows that these are still open questions. For these indicators to become one of the shared tools for sustaining the debate on forest management and policies, perhaps one should begin by reversing the order and consider the choice of indicators as an outcome of an agreement negotiated between forest managers and users with the benefit of expert input. © AgroParisTech, 2013.