The IFF is the offspring of the United Nations Commission for Sustainable Development that is charged with pursuing the forest commitments from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Any approach to forest conservation that does not address the needs of these people is doomed. Forests have to create jobs, products, services and income for those living in and around them. Touch them, and all sorts of, ecological catastrophes occur, sparking destructive chain reactions. But now there's abundant evidence that tropical forests are surprisingly hardy, perhaps no more fragile than any other terrestrial ecosystem.
Tropical forests are dynamic.
A patch of land portrayed as pristine, old growth forest may have been quite different 100 or 200 years before. Trees fall, and other species grow. Forests are subject to all sorts of natural occurrences that substantially modify them. These terms reflect a vision of tropical forests formulated from afar. There is also excessive pessimism in the international community, on the impact of forest 'fragmentation.