Land Use Planning for Sustainable Forestry

Abstract

The planning and overall management of rural land use are widely recognized as being complex and complicated processes. The state and the dynamics of land use derive from both the natural endowment of the area under consideration and related attributes of the human society. Forest land use has not long been a particular focus of land use planning and rural development. However, increasing human populations with growing needs locally and in a global context, the transformation of forests to other land use types such as agriculture and pasture, but also for purposes of settlement, mining, technical infrastructure, etc., have resulted in efforts to forecast the sustainability of land use based on historical development, the current state and potentials. Land use practices producing results other than those expected have led to the development and implementation of various participatory approaches ahead of exclusively technocratic means of planning. Accordingly, contemporary land use planning is characterized by argumentation stemming from a combination of top-down and bottom-up procedures. Forests continue to play a secondary role relative to other rural land uses, especially agriculture and grassland. Nevertheless, a recognition of the multiple production, protection and service functions of the large proportion of forests worldwide increasingly justifies and impels the adoption of innovative concepts such as adaptive strategy development and strategic spatial planning approaches to ensure an appropriate integration of forests and their management in rural development at local, landscape and regional level.