Adapting to climate change in Canadian forest management: Past, present and future

Abstract

Canadian forest management agencies have already made significant progress in addressing climate change. Adaptation measures have included undertaking research and completing assessments; implementing organizational changes; beginning to modify policy, practices, and approaches; developing tools; and providing guidance and education. Although progress to date is encouraging, forest managers recognize that adaptation is in its early stages. Suggested next steps include making further progress in adapting wildfire management; adapting forest and pest management; incorporating climate change considerations into seed transfer, tree species selection, and stocking policies; adapting forest industry operations; and adapting forest management decision making by including climate change in assessment, monitoring, analysis, and forest management planning. Potential longer term options are to move toward integrated adaptation and mitigation and to modify forest management to account for the effects of climate change on processes at broader landscape scales. Moving forward with implementation requires consideration of the degree to which organizations and/or key stakeholders are ready, able, and willing to implement the changes and whether there are appropriate partnerships, enabling institutions, required science and actionable knowledge, sufficient adaptation resources (in terms of knowledgeable individuals and funding), and sufficient leadership to meaningfully move forward with change.

The calm before the storm: How climate change drives forestry evolutions

“…Among the many technical, organizational, and economic adaptations found in the literature, the interviews showed that only some of them were implemented in the Vosges and Landes regions. In the two French study cases, implementation focused on technical changes fostering timber production and considered ecological processes to be instrumental features of forestry, a finding similar to what has been observed in the Swedish, Australian or Canadian forest sectors (Keskitalo et al 2016;Keenan 2017;Williamson et al 2019).…”

“…Faced with the uncertainty and urgency of climate change, we argue that the time has now come to invest more time. We acknowledge the crucial role of technical changes in forestry and the need to upgrade their design at a wider spatial scale (Williamson et al 2019). However, a complementary way to adapt is to reconsider why forests are managed and not only how.…”

“…In line with the need to adapt, an abundant body of literature now confirms how "climateproof" paradigms of forest management have arisen such as adaptive management (Linder 2000;Noss 2001; Bolte et al 2009) and the consideration of uncertainties by diversifying silvicultural practices and objectives (Keenan 2015;Augustynczik et al 2019). However, in comparison, very little research has explored how foresters currently handle the impacts and uncertainties of climate change in the 4 field (Kolström et al 2011;Van Gameren 2014;Nelson et al 2016).This is of the highest importance, because concrete changes drive forest ecological trajectories, and feedback from the field can help to improve public policies related to forest management (Brockerhoff et al 2017;Williamson et al 2019).…”

Forest Fire Control Model in Sungai Wain Protection Forest Ecosystem, East Kalimantan, Indonesia

“…They found that estimates regarding future fire activities in this century are less than that of the historical (pre-industrial) recorded in many locations worldwide. It was suggested that boreal forest management is potentially utilized to re-create forest-age structures from fire-dominated pre-industrial landscapes [14].…”

Quantifying the Variability of Forest Ecosystem Vulnerability in the Largest Water Tower Region Globally

“…Therefore, the improvement of soil retention capacity is needed in the regions with higher vulnerability [ 36 , 52 , 53 ]. It is also critical to strengthen the monitoring and prediction of climate changes and consider the impact of climate changes in forest resource assessment, monitoring, investigation, analysis, and long-term planning [ 54 ]. In terms of environmental disturbance, the vulnerability tends to decrease, but the vulnerability risk of the southeastern marginal area is still high.…”