FORESTRY NEPAL

Forestry is an extensive land use system in Nepal. The forest and trees provide a vast array of goods and services to human beings. Forest and tree resources provide the basic commodities such as fuel wood, timber and fodder to the people and serve as an important ecological function such as biodiversity conservation, erosion control, and carbondioxide consumption. Agriculture is the mainstay of economy in the country as agriculture and forestry together has 32% contribution in total gross domestic product of the country. Nearly two-third of the country's total population depends on agriculture profession for sustaining their livelihoods.
The rate of forest depletion was significantly high up to nineties due to political, socioeconomic and administrative reasons. The  last National Forest Inventory (NFI) was carried out in early nineties in Nepal. According to that inventory, forest and shrub together cover about 5.83 million ha, which is 39.6% of the total land area of the country.  The rate of forest area decreasing was 1.7% per annum during 1978/79 to 1994, whereas rate of forest and shrub depleting rate was 0.5% per annum during the same period. Since then NFI has not been done to update data on forest cover change.
Community Forestry (CF) policy has been implemented from the early eighties and started to handover all the accessible national forests  to the local people for their management and use. The 90’s was the decade of community forestry in Nepal and the   policy and programme also extended to the whole part of the country. This policy has brought significant positive change to restore denuded mountain landscape. Recent studies from 20 Terai districts (southern most districts) revealed that the rate of forest cover changed was at an annual rate of 0.06% during the period of 1990/91 to 2000/2001.
Macro level studies and visual interpretations revealed that Nepal’s forest coverage and condition has significantly improved due to the Community Forestry (CF) intervention. Contexts have been dramatically changed inside and outside the forest. However, forest and forestry data have not been updated yet at national level and early nineties data do not represent present situation. Although questions have been raised on reliability of National FRA2005 report, estimation and extrapolation from outdated data for FRA2010 will make another big mistake.  Thus, new tables have been filled up from available data for FRA2010; however forest and forestry related primary data have not been changed. As result, many tables are not filled up. Besides, processes of calibration and estimation from outdated original data have not been followed.  Most importantly, Nepal is planning to conduct NFI in near future and we would like to promise to provide updated data when data will be generated.