IFSA and Forestry Education

Over the past years, forestry education has had to face different major obstacles, such as a gap between programs and employers’ needs, less enrolment of students, insufficient means. It has now to be more prepared to upcoming global challenges and needs within the forestry sector, as well as responsibilities towards society: economic, ecological and social transformations, needs for improved cooperation and adaptation to globalization.

One partial solution proposed by students was to create the International Forestry Students’ Association (IFSA) in 1990, which aimed to exchange ideas, experiences and views and to represent them at the international level.

The aim of this presentation will be to show the contribution of IFSA to forestry students and education, different initiatives aiming to increase its efficiency, as well as ways to further improve forestry education around the world.

IFSA provides many opportunities to develop and improve students’ open mind but also important soft and forest related skills and knowledge, better preparing students to their professional life. IFSA also participates to improve global and regional forestry education. It plays a role in the promotion of international forestry MSc courses in Europe which permit people from all over the world to study forestry in very good conditions. Recently, IFSA has started to implement a global survey aiming to populate a database gathering information on forestry MSc courses around the world to identify the most important needs and strategies adopted at global and regional scale in terms of forestry education.

Cooperation with Professional organisations
	Since several years now, IFSA collaborates with professional forest organisations on the theme of Forestry Education. Its main mission is to provide a student's vision in the discussion but by many times IFSA also initiated new projects and idea to make forest education better worldwide.

Global Action Plan for Forestry Education (GAPFE)
The Global Action Plan for Forestry Education (GAPFE) is an IFSA's initiative started in 2009. This document is a discussion piece which presents potential way forward to increase society's ability to respond to the demands of forestry education. This document was drafted by a group of IFSA students and discussed during the World Forestry Congress 2009.

Finally, IFSA initiated in 2008 a global survey among forest students in order to get a good overview of the current situation and gather ideas from all part of the world to improve it. The result of this survey will be published in the upcoming months on this website and hopefully presented during the WFC 2009.

Another idea of work is also to create a database gathering MSc programmes linked to forest sector. Such a tool would be quite efficient for example to help students wanted to study abroad their country to find where they can study a particular topic.