Forest management and climate change

Abstract

Introduction. Each climate change approach has a place within forest management not only at the national level but also within the management plans of non-industrial private forest owners (hereafter forest owners), who provide ecosystem services to their communities and are working to keep their forests productive for decades to come. Climate change considerations are especially important in parts of the boreal forest that are dominantly owned by private individuals and families.

Goal. There are theoretical and methodological rationale for the role of forestryin adapting to the effects of climate change and mitigating them.

Methods. In the study the following methods are used: methods of systematization and generalization; a comparative methods – to analyze the dynamics of indicators of the volume and structure of enterprises; logical method – for a consistent generalization of theoretical and practical scientific research statements.

Results. Adapting the management of forest resources to climate change involves addressing several crucial aspects to provide a valid basis for decision making. These include the knowledge and belief of decision makers, the mapping of management options for the current as well as anticipated future bioclimatic and socioeconomic conditions, and the ways decisions are evaluated and made. Weinvestigate the adaptive management process and develop a framework including these three aspects, thus providing a structured way to analyze the challenges and opportunities of managing forests in the face of climate change. Finally, our proposed framework for identifying.

Because climate change is a dynamic and complex phenomenon we need to (i) monitor its physical state, i.e., most indicative properties, to recognize the actual climate development, (ii) consider the impacts of this development on biological systems, and (iii) integrate knowledge and beliefs of decision makers into dynamic models of decision-making processes. Therefore, policies targeting the application of a single adaptive management strategy to a greater area, e.g., a region or an entire country, may be suboptimal for some forest owners and/or properties. This underscores that structured and transparent generation of decision alternatives should span a sufficiently large decision space. AFM strategies should at least aim at maintaining current forest ecosystem goods and services provision and at providing an opportunity to implement prevention strategies against increasing damages to forest caused by factors with high regional impact, i.e., disturbances such as forest fire, windthrow, and pathogen calamities.Forestresilience to climate change will be enhanced through fostering diversity at different levels, e.g., AFM and genetic adaptation. This starts with better consideration of genetic diversity in AFM strategies, but applies also to the combination of different AFM strategies at the landscape scale and the consideration of alternative decision-making approaches.

Keywords: behavioral adaptation; forest management; knowledge management; mathematical programming; process-based models; spatial planning