DEVELOPMENT OF EFFECTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS SUPPORTING 
MONITORING AND CERTIFICATION PROCESS OF PRODUCTION FOREST IN 
INDONESIA: CONCEPT AND PROGRESS 
M. A. Sharifi, And Y. Hussin 
International Institute For Geo-Information And Earth Observation 
P.O. Box 6,7500 Aa Enschede, The Netherlands 
Alisharifi@]Itc.NI 
Working Group VII/3: Integrated Monitoring Systems for Resource Management 
KEYWORDS: Monitoring, Forest Certification, Remote Sensing, GIS, illegal logging 
ABSTRACT 
To improve the assessment of sustainability situation of 
production forest management a research project has been 
designed and being implemented jointly by the International 
Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation 
“ITC, TROPENBOS International foundation, and the 
Indonesian Watershed Management Technology Center, in 
collaboration with Indonesian Eco-Labeling Institute and the 
Ministry of Forestry in Indonesia. The project is aiming at * 
Design and development of an effective monitoring and 
certification system to support sustainable management of 
production forest in Indonesia. This article reports on some of 
the findings of this research program. In this context special 
attention will be given to the potential role of GIS, Remote 
Sensing and Decision Science. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Rapid decline of forest cover and forest degradation especially 
in the tropical rain forest is now acknowledged as a “global 
problem” with social, economical and environmental 
implications. To assist in coping with the problem and to 
promote sustainable forest management, one of the policy 
instrument which is formulated by the international 
communities is “Forest Certification” that would allow export 
of forestry products only from so-called "sustainable managed 
forests". In this line, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry has 
decided to extend the concession rights of only those 
concessionaries that are practicing Sustainable Forest 
Management” “mandatory certification”. What is Sustainable 
Forest Management? How can it be achieved and assessed, 
especially considering the decentralization process that has 
taken place in Indonesia? What should be the criteria and 
indicators of achievement? How should they be measured, 
estimated and generalized; how should they be aggregated to a 
decision reflecting sustainability? how can it be handled in 
large areas ranging form a few hundreds to hundred thousands 
ofhectares of forest, many of which not easily accessible. 
Currently, many scientists are involved in the development of 
models, procedures, standards to conceptualise, operaionalize 
and evaluate Sustainable Forestry Management “SFM” at the 
international, national or forest management unit (FMU) level. 
As a result, many management models for SFM and guidelines 
with large sets of sustainability Criteria, Indicators and 
Verifiers have been developed and recommended. However the 
  
" For the license extension purpose, certification process is 
compulsory/mandatory, while for forest product trading 
certification is voluntary such as what LEI developed. 
developed management models and their related indicator 
system so far experiences problem in terms of feasibility, 
efficiency and effectiveness. This is especially true in Indonesia 
where new policies for decentralization and partnership with 
local communities have been adopted. The certification model 
for the Indonesian production forest had been developed based 
on a forest management model, which assumes the full 
authorities for the concessionaire and the central government. 
Such assumption is not valid and the situation has completely 
changed. The current criteria and indicators have little 
connection with the actual forest management practices, and are 
yet intended to assess the quality of management (LEI, 2000). 
The current attempts to measure and verify so many criteria, 
indicators, and verifiers (over 200) require excessively large 
sets of information from the concessions (Figure 1). Proper 
acquisition, management and processing of such information 
are a massive and complex process. In some cases, non- 
existence, in others non-availability, accessibility and 
questionable reliability of the data and information, data 
capture, collection and processing, the time and cost that 
involved, has made the proper implementation of ‘certification’ 
in accordance with these excessive numbers of hierarchically 
structured indicators very difficult, especially when sufficient 
reliability is expected. 
To improve the situation this research has been developed and 
supported by a number of international and national Institutions 
in Holland as well as in Indonesia. The main contributors from 
Holland are ITC, and TROPENBOS International, and in 
Indonesia Watershed Management Technology Centre, 
Indonesian Eco-labelling Institute, CIFOR, and the relevant 
departments within the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry. The 
research which is planned for 2003-2007, includes the 
following main components: 
-  Selection/adaptation of a collaborative management model 
for SFM of production forest 
- Design and development of an information model to 
support sustainable management of production forest. Such 
system internally will be used to support the management 
of the concession as well as certification process. 
- Design and development of a spatial decision support 
system to support monitoring and certification of 
sustainable forest management based on the above 
information model. 
This paper will elaborate on the existing problems of 
certification process in Indonesia, and further describes the 
objectives, concept, components and some of the achievements 
of the project.