Climate and biodiversity-smart forestry and forest restoration across Europe; who does it, why, and how it could develop?

Abstract

Climate and biodiversity smart forestry (CBS) and forest restoration emphasize the integration of biodiversity conservation to climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches that synergistically realize multiple ecosystem services. These approaches purport spatially integrating multiple forest management objectives by selecting the “smartest” management practices for enabling synergies within the forest region in question. When it comes to examining the current state of CBS and forest restoration practices across Europe, little can be said, as there is limited country specific information about the different types of CBS and forestry restoration practices implemented by European forestry practitioners. At the same time, there is limited knowledge about the barriers and drivers impacting the implementation of these practices. To tackle these shortcomings, this research examines primary data from (i) inductively analysed interviews with forestry practitioners in nine countries across Europe (i.e., Finland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom), and (ii) a Europe-wide questionnaire distributed through both a representative general-population survey and through top-down umbrella organizations representing various forestry practitioners. The interviews function to elicit country-specific CBS and forest restoration management practices alongside their respective barriers and drivers to implementation. The survey operationalizes these salient findings and asks respondents to identify their current forest management objectives, the CBS and forest restoration practices they implement, and relevant drivers and barriers to implementation. This data is used to descriptively quantify which CBS and forest restoration practices occur across different countries in Europe and statistically analysing the extent to which different drivers and barriers shape the implementation of these practices. Aside from providing a concrete overview of CBS and forest restoration practices, the study inductively builds a European-level typology of forestry practitioners based on forest owner objectives. This typology is useful for designing future CBS forest policy scenarios and large-scale agent-based modelling.