Enhancing resilience - a key strategy to support Climate Smart Forestry

Abstract

Climate change and enhanced disturbance risks are strongly affecting the social-ecological forest systems and their resilience. Forest owners and managers need concrete guidance on forest management when it comes to climate change adaptation and enhancing biodiversity while ensuring the resilience of forests to disturbances. Similarly, forest value chain decision makers should aim to make their business more resilient to climate change, changed societal demands and increased disturbance risks, affecting the production potentials and climate change mitigation effects of wood products. Climate Smart Forestry (CSF) needs to consider both, forest and value chain resilience. Forest resilience may vary depending on forest type. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how forest resilience can be increased through management decisions to safeguard sustainable forest ecosystem provisioning and mitigate undesirable impacts. Value chain resilience, on the other hand strongly depends on technology and timber resourcing choices, and finally, the broader societal resilience depends on the societal context, demand and substitution possibilities.

We present results from the Horizon 2020 research project RESONATE, which investigates resilience enhancing measures in nine regional case studies across Europe. Using criteria and indicators derived from model projections with consistent climate scenarios we demonstrate that enhancing resilience is a balancing act: increasing resilience in one part of the social-ecological system may lead to trade-offs in another part of the system. For example, increasing share of broadleaved species and enhancing tree species diversity are crucial climate change adaptation and CSF strategies, which on the other hand may limit climate change mitigation potentials of long-lived harvested wood products made of coniferous wood. By analysing such examples from diverse regional cases we aim to synthesize practice-relevant recommendations for Climate Smart Forestry.