Financial assessment of community forest management: lessons from a cross-sectional study of timber management systems in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

To understand the financial feasibility of externally-driven community forestry management (CFM), this study assesses twelve CFM systems in the Brazilian Amazon classified as particularly successful by supporting organizations. The study showed that significant investments were necessary to set up the initiatives, including pre-financing the annual operational costs. Only three of the twelve management systems were found to be financially viable. These successful cases were able to follow the Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) guidelines due to the large scale of their operations. The smaller initiatives were not financially autonomous. The findings indicate that the legal regulations and technical principles of the CFM approach do not correspond to the capacities and realities of typical local forest users in the Brazilian Amazon. There is an urgent need to better adapt this approach to the interests and capacities of local resource users.