Forests under pressure: addressing disruptions, boosting resilience, and guiding policy
Our Scientific Seminar on 18 September in Prague explored the challenges facing forests, and looked at how we can navigate uncertainty, build resilience and guide policy responses.
The first session focused on the observed and expected impacts of disturbances, encompassing monitoring challenges, current and future disturbance trends, and disturbance impacts, not just on forest biodiversity and the carbon sink, but also on the whole value chain.
Speakers highlighted the fact that monitoring of disturbances is crucial. New technologies and AI are opening doors to enable better information and modelling – for example the long-term disturbance projections developed in the RESONATE project - but relevant and high-quality reference data to train algorithms is costly and remains a bottleneck.
Disturbance trends show that with more warming, we will have much more disturbance, affecting all regions. This means we will have to make sure that we are putting enough efforts into climate change mitigation, as well as different policy responses across regions, as one size will not fit all.
Modelling shows that these disturbances will affect service provisioning (eg biomass, biodiversity) in different ways. These effects are still smaller than the planned harvest, at least at the national or continental level, but have a big effect on the carbon sink. Value chains would see differences between short-term and long-term impacts, with owners affected much more rapidly than industry which can profit from short term market effects.
The second session focused on strategies for prevention and responses to future disturbances, including good practices and practical approaches to reducing risks.
Speakers emphasised the importance of preparedness, rather than just response. This includes the use of the four-phase emergency management cycle: prevention, being prepared (eg by reducing tree density), responding efficiently (eg salvage and sanitary logging for bark beetle outbreaks), and recovery (eg keeping continuity with tree species adapted to future conditions, and creating biodiversity hot spots to secure resilience). We need to learn from successful past practices, for example traditional fire uses, to create wildfire resilient landscapes. This sharing should take place across countries, and across landowners, talking about what works and what doesn’t, making use of new technologies such as AI to speed up processes.
The afternoon focused on policy and management responses, taking in panel discussions on policy and governance implications, as well as best practices and case studies.
Common threads included the need for science to support decision-making, so that policies could be refocused towards the prevention of future disturbances and resilience. This has included, for example making changes to national forest policies to give forest owners more flexibility in forest management plans, or introducing financial and other measures like advisory services or payments for ecosystem services. Speakers also emphasised the need to weigh economic considerations alongside environmental impacts for salvage and restoration, and the importance of having the right monetary incentives (not necessarily always from public money) in place.
Discussions further highlighted the importance of stakeholder consultation, and communication from science to policy to practitioners on the ground to enable implementation. Here the new Forest Risk Facility (FoRISK) which connects knowledge, best practice, innovation approaches and experts can play a key role.
