Analysis of sustainability of production processes and proposal of indicators of sustainable development in forest bioeconomy

Ing. Isaac Nyarko

Doctoral thesis

Abstract:

ABSTRACT Sustainable development in a forest bioeconomy is a system geared towards improving people’s socioeconomic and environmental health through forestry. Sustainable forest bioeconomy (SFB) as a multidimensional approach for establishing mutual benefits between forest ecosystems, environment, economy, and human is a nature-based solution for promising future. Thus, a good knowledge about the forest bioeconomic system will enhance people to become custodians of the forest ecosystems instead of being destroyers. For example, Africa including Ghana accounted for the highest forest loss in the global records in the last 3-5 decades which might be attributed to many factors including population growth, poverty, high illiteracy, and political irresponsibility as the major causes. These have adverse effects on the indicators of sustainable forest bioeconomy and development such as GDP, forest area, and forest carbon stocks. This thesis first focused on entire Africa by quantifying the volume of wood charcoal production, its socio-economics, and environmental impacts of the long-term deforestation and forest degradation in the region. After the holistic assessment of the wood charcoal production in Africa, the work became narrowed to only Ghana because of the time scale and data needs and dearth to study entire Africa. Thus, the second focus of the thesis was on the assessment of the indicators and drivers of a sustainable forest bioeconomy in Ghana for three decades (1990–2020), and the key indicators and drivers examined were areas of forest cover, export quantity, export value, GDP, human population, climate season, average income per citizen, literacy rate, and others. Similarly, the third phase of the thesis comprehensively focused on carbon stocks (Cstocks) which is a major indicator of sustainable development for forest bioeconomy. Cstocks was chosen because of its high inter/intra-links with other indicators, as well as its dynamics and strong potential in influencing the physical, social, and economic environment. For instance, Cstocks to a large extent controls climate change, nutrients, water, trees, and other biophysical indicators of the forest ecosystems, consequently, regulates the condition of the forests ecosystem services, as well as the people’s livelihoods and well-being. Therefore, both primary and secondary data from the field, national and international databases including historically robust data from the databases of UN-FAO, FAOSTAT, World Bank, International Energy Agency (IEA), United Nations Statistics Division, UN-DESA energy statistics yearbook, and the Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) were used. The data were analyzed using different statistical and geospatial software packages such as IBM SPSS 29.0, CANOCO 5.0, and ArcGIS 10.5. In the study covering entire Africa, it was found that East Africa had the highest average wood charcoal production which was 32,058,244 tonnes representing 43.2% of the production whereas West Africa had 23,831,683 tonnes denoting 32.1%, while other regions accounted for less than 12%. On the studies focusing on Ghana forests’ contributions to GDP vary between the forest–vegetation belts and regions and decreased rapidly from 1990 to 2020. The highest drivers of deforestation were population growth, agricultural activities, and commodity-driven deforestation. Cstocks had significant negative correlation with population growth, carbon emissions, forest growing stock, forest loss and use of forest for biofuel. Findings from the thesis will significantly help to bring lasting solutions to deforestation and enhance the sustainable forest bioeconomy. The study has unveiled remote drivers of forest loss that have been long overlooked by previous studies. A sustainable enlightenment campaign and routine informal education of the rural people are highly necessary. This is because some of the peoples’ reasons for deforestation and preference for forest products com

Abstract:

pared with modern resources seem convincing and logical.

Keywords

Forest bioeconomy, carbon stocks, sustainable development, forest bioeconomy indicators, climate change, deforestation.

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 7. 4. 2024

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: doc. Ing. Miroslav Hájek, Ph.D.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences

Doctoral programme / field:
Forestry Engineering / Wood Processing and Forest Machinery