This National Strategy for Community Forestry aims to strengthen the capacity of provincial authorities and ensure that the country’s community forestry laws do in fact include and benefit communities. The plan calls for an “experimental phase” over the next five years to gradually provide access to areas of the roughly 700,000 square kilometres of available forest through community management permits and to test different approaches to community forestry through a number of officially recognised pilot projects.
The implementation of the National Strategy should be ensured on four axes:
1. the establishment of a steering committee (national and provincial);
2. the regular convening of the Roundtable on Community Forestry (at both national and provincial levels) to intensify the dialogue between stakeholders involved;
3. establishing a database of local community forest concessions;
4. ongoing monitoring of these concessions to assess the impact on forest protection, as well as drivers of deforestation and degradation.
In French: Stratégie Nationale pour la Foresterie Communautaire .