Causal pathways to achieve social and ecological benefits from forests are unclear, because there are few systematic multicountry empirical analyses that identify important factors and their complex ...relationships with social and ecological outcomes. This study examines biodiversity conservation and forest-based livelihood outcomes using a data set on 84 sites from six countries in East Africa and South Asia. We find both positive and negative relationships, leading to joint wins, losses, and trade-offs depending on specific contextual factors; participation in forest governance institutions by local forest users is strongly associated with jointly positive outcomes for forests in our study.
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The public view of tree plantations is somewhat ambiguous. While planting a single tree is generally considered good for the environment, planting a million trees raises concerns in some circles. ...Although plantations are often used to compensate for bad forestry practices, to willingly simplify otherwise complex forest ecosystems, or as a strategy for allowing the current petroleumâbased economy to continue on its course, we believe plantations have a legitimate place in the sustainable management of forests. Multiâpurpose plantations, designed to meet a wide variety of social, economic, and environmental objectives, can provide key ecosystem services, help preserve the world's remaining primary forests, and sequester an important proportion of the atmospheric carbon released by humans over the past 300 years.
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Place-making — the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live — is an important but oft-neglected ...part of political theory. Place-making is an inherently networked process, constituted by the socio-spatial relationships that link individuals together through a common place-frame. While place-oriented scholars have long acknowledged the importance of interaction and communication in place-making, the mutual integration of network concepts, political theorisations and place conceptualisations has been relatively weak. We use case studies in Bolivia's forests and Athens, USA to explore how integrating these concepts can guide empirical research. This article argues that a more robust and explicit notion of 'relational place-making' — the networked, political processes of place-framing — positions the concept of place in a way that offers new analytical utility for political and urban geographic scholars.
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Some model experiments predict a large-scale substitution of Amazon forest by savannah-like vegetation by the end of the twenty-first century. Expanding global demands for biofuels and grains, ...positive feedbacks in the Amazon forest fire regime and drought may drive a faster process of forest degradation that could lead to a near-term forest dieback. Rising worldwide demands for biofuel and meat are creating powerful new incentives for agro-industrial expansion into Amazon forest regions. Forest fires, drought and logging increase susceptibility to further burning while deforestation and smoke can inhibit rainfall, exacerbating fire risk. If sea surface temperature anomalies (such as El Niño episodes) and associated Amazon droughts of the last decade continue into the future, approximately 55% of the forests of the Amazon will be cleared, logged, damaged by drought or burned over the next 20 years, emitting 15-26 Pg of carbon to the atmosphere. Several important trends could prevent a near-term dieback. As fire-sensitive investments accumulate in the landscape, property holders use less fire and invest more in fire control. Commodity markets are demanding higher environmental performance from farmers and cattle ranchers. Protected areas have been established in the pathway of expanding agricultural frontiers. Finally, emerging carbon market incentives for reductions in deforestation could support these trends.
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In boreal commercial forests, carbon sequestration, climate change adaptation, and biodiversity conservation can be promoted through various measures. This study examines the factors affecting ...non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners' preferences for such forest management practices. A systematic literature review serves as a reference for the empirical analysis of a survey data on the Finnish NIPF owners' stated willingness to adopt thirteen distinct forest management practices. Binary logit models reveal socio-demographic factors, site-specific characteristics, previous forest management, and motivations for forest ownership that are associated with the stated adoption of management practices. Especially, environmental and financial motivations play an important role in decisions concerning forest management practices. Statistically significant factors vary depending on the forest management practice, reflecting the NIPF owner heterogeneity. Younger and highly educated forest owners are more supportive for various management practices that promote biodiversity, while older forest owners are reluctant towards deadwood retention. The results underline the importance of accounting for heterogeneous preferences regarding forest management practices when designing and implementing policies and advisory services aiming at enhancing carbon sequestration, climate change adaptation, or biodiversity in boreal commercial forests.
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Balancing economic, ecological, and social values has long been a challenge in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where conflict over timber harvest and old-growth habitat on public lands has been ...contentious for the past several decades. The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted two decades ago to guide management on federal lands, is currently being revised as the region searches for a balance between sustainable timber yields and habitat for sensitive species. In addition, climate change imposes a high degree of uncertainty on future forest productivity, sustainability of timber harvest, wildfire risk, and species habitat. We evaluated the long-term, landscape-scale trade-offs among carbon (C) storage, timber yield, and old forest habitat given projected climate change and shifts in forest management policy across 2.1 million hectares of forests in the Oregon Coast Range. Projections highlight the divergence between private and public lands under business-as-usual forest management, where private industrial forests are heavily harvested and many public (especially federal) lands increase C and old forest over time but provide little timber. Three alternative management scenarios altering the amount and type of timber harvest show widely varying levels of ecosystem C and old-forest habitat. On federal lands, ecological forestry practices also allowed a simultaneous increase in old forest and natural early-seral habitat. The ecosystem C implications of shifts away from current practices were large, with current practices retaining up to 105 Tg more C than the alternative scenarios by the end of the century. Our results suggest climate change is likely to increase forest productivity by 30-41% and total ecosystem C storage by 11-15% over the next century as warmer winter temperatures allow greater forest productivity in cooler months. These gains in C storage are unlikely to be offset by wildfire under climate change, due to the legacy of management and effective fire suppression. Our scenarios of future conditions can inform policy makers, land managers, and the public about the potential effects of land management alternatives, climate change, and the trade-offs that are inherent to management and policy in the region.
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Driven by increased space demand for urbanization and conservation as well as demand for food and bioenergy, competition for forestland in China has intensified. Meanwhile, the forestland in China ...has been poorly managed, leading to low stand quality, growth rate, and ecosystem functionality. Thus, an overarching question has been how to manage the country's forestland more efficiently. The objective of this paper is to address this question by assessing China's forestry development strategy, policy, and practice against the potential of its forests and the goal of its society. Our analysis suggests that a crucial pathway is to implement a classified management strategy, whereby a small portion of suitable forestland is dedicated to intensive plantations for producing timber and fiber, while a selective but large part of the other commercial forests will be more effectively managed to provide ecosystem services as well as to produce timber. Increases in growth and yield from these forests will result in positive feedbacks such that a larger amount of remaining forestland can be devoted to other non-timber uses to achieve sustainability nationally. In addition, a substantial portion of forestland has been and will be further set aside as nature reserves, wildlife habitats, and forest parks, etc. To implement this strategy successfully, China must make transform its forestry organizational and governance systems.
•A main pathway China's forestry is to implement a classified management strategy.•A small portion of forestland to be dedicated to intensive timber plantations.•A substantial part to be set aside as various protected areas.•Other existing forests to be more managed effectively.•Positive feedbacks and complementarities will be engendered among these parts.•Transformative changes to its forest governance systems will be key.
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Protection of large natural forest landscapes is a highly important task to help fulfill different international strategic initiatives to protect forest biodiversity, to reduce carbon emissions from ...deforestation and forest degradation, and to stimulate sustainable forest management practices. This paper introduces a new approach for mapping large intact forest landscapes (IFL), defined as an unbroken expanse of natural ecosystems within areas of current forest extent, without signs of significant human activity, and having an area of at least 500 km2. We have created a global IFL map using existing fine-scale maps and a global coverage of high spatial resolution satellite imagery. We estimate the global area of IFL within the current extent of forest ecosystems (forest zone) to be 13.1 million km² or 23.5% of the forest zone. The vast majority of IFL are found in two biomes: Dense Tropical and Subtropical Forests (45.3%) and Boreal Forests (43.8%). The lowest proportion of IFL is found in Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests. The IFL exist in 66 of the 149 countries that together make up the forest zone. Three of them—Canada, Russia, and Brazil—contain 63.8% of the total IFL area. Of the world’s IFL area, 18.9% has some form of protection, but only 9.7% is strictly protected, i.e., belongs to IUCN protected areas categories I–III. The world IFL map presented here is intended to underpin the development of a general strategy for nature conservation at the global and regional scales. It also defines a baseline for monitoring deforestation and forest degradation that is well suited for use with operational and cost-effective satellite data. All project results and IFL maps are available on a dedicated web site (http://www.intactforests.org).
The objective of this review is to give ecologists and policy makers a better understanding of forest carbon dynamics and recent policy and management activities in this arena. The ecology of forest ...carbon is well understood, but measurement and projection of carbon sequestration at small scales can be costly. Some forest management activities qualify as offsets in various carbon markets. To promote wider use, a system is needed that will provide inexpensive and standardized approaches to forest carbon accounting that are not prone to dishonest handling. The prospects are fairly promising for development of such a system, but first, technical and organizational constraints must be overcome. In contrast, the benefits - in terms of greenhouse-gas reduction - of substituting wood for other building materials, and in displacing fossil fuel energy, could be realized immediately, if standards for calculations can be developed.
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Contemporary land-use pressures have a significant impact on the extent and condition of forests in the eastern United States, causing a regional-scale decline in forest cover. Earlier in the 20th ...century, land cover was on a trajectory of forest expansion that followed agricultural abandonment. However, the potential for forest regeneration has slowed, and the extent of regional forest cover has declined by more than 4.0%. Using remote-sensing data, statistical sampling, and change-detection methods, this research shows how land conversion varies spatially and temporally across the East from 1973–2000, and how those changes affect regional land-change dynamics. The analysis shows that agricultural land use has continued to decline, and that this enables forest recovery; however, an important land-cover transition has occurred, from a mode of regional forest-cover gain to one of forest-cover loss caused by timber cutting cycles, urbanization, and other land-use demands.
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