The Inception Workshop of “Pilot Project of Multifunctional Forests” was successfully held on 24 October 2011. About 20 participants include forestry officials in the local government, Executing Agency representatives, forest farmers, experts on forestry and APFNet secretariat representatives attended the workshop.

Mr. Qu Guilin, Executive Director of the APFNet Secretariat, addressed the workshop. After briefly introducing APFNet Qu emphasized that multifunction forestry and close-to-natural management of forest will be one of the priorities in the global forestry. This demonstration project will provide relevant experiences for other economies in the Asia-Pacific region with similar situation. Mr. Qu hoped that the project Executing Agency could cooperate with local government well to strengthen the capacity building and construct a good benefit-sharing mechanism to really motivate the local community. Experts invited gave the reports on multifunction forestry and community co-management. Representatives from enterprises and local community shared their experiences and perspectives on the implementation of the project. After that, the participants visited the project sites of the close-natural management of Pinus tabulaeformis plantation, Fangxiang edible mushrooms processing plants and Dahesen nursery.

The first Project Steering Committee (PSC) meeting was held after the field visit. The composition and responsibility of PSC were adopted at the meeting. The director of project executing agency introduced the overall work plan and the project’s first-year work plan, which were both discussed at the meeting. APFNet representatives attended the meeting as an observer and put forward some recommendations on the overall work plan, first-year work plan, project management and use of the project fund.

The total budgets of this project is USD$ 1,500,615, among which USD$ 1,176,000 is granted by APFNet and USD$ 324,615 will be contributed by the counterpart within the 3-year duration. This project aims to build a demonstration site for multifunction forestry under close-natural management and to motivate the local community through community co-management and protection of non-timber forest products. The project is expected to provide exemplary experiences for other economies on sustainable forest management in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.