Forest environmental frontiers around the globe: Old patterns and new trends in forest governance

Abstract

Forests are subject to a huge variety of often competing socio-economic demands and environmental change. This paper assesses the related conflicts that occur along what we label to be a ''Global Forest Environmental Frontier''. Assessing 11 contributions to a special issue on the same topic, it summarizes the main contents of these papers and concludes with an assessment of major trends. The contributions to the special issue take both a regional and topic-related approach, assessing forest environmental conflicts on all five forested continents and investigating issues such as forest biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, environmental justice and equity, development, and forest management and conservation discourses. Taken together, they provide an overview on the multiple facets of the Global Forest Environmental Frontier, but also identify some shared patterns and trajectories, which are outlined at the end of this paper.

Meeting the European Union’s Forest Strategy goals: A comparative European assessment.

“…The conflict between biodiversity conservation and wood production is a pattern to be found in all countries but it varies in degree, confirming previous research (Beland Lindahl et al 2023;Winkel et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2017). It seems especially polarised in countries where wood production is the main objective of a strong timber/pulp industry and supported by public policy (e.g., SE and FI and, to some extent, NO, PL, RO and ES-PQV) and/or where the conservation movement is strong and deeply rooted in society (e.g., NL)…”

Meeting the European Union’s Forest Strategy goals: A comparative European assessment.

“…The conflict between biodiversity conservation and wood production is a pattern to be found in all countries but it varies in degree, confirming previous research (Beland Lindahl et al 2023;Winkel et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2017). It seems especially polarised in countries where wood production is the main objective of a strong timber/pulp industry and supported by public policy (e.g., SE and FI and, to some extent, NO, PL, RO and ES-PQV) and/or where the conservation movement is strong and deeply rooted in society (e.g., NL)…”

DeepFire: A Novel Dataset and Deep Transfer Learning Benchmark for Forest Fire Detection

“…Forests are one of the vital natural resources in the world. They provide materials and minerals which are used in production, and, in the meantime, it has a significant role in preventing sandstorms, maintaining balance in ecological system, and water conservation [1]. In recent years, forest fire cases have increased due to the dry climate and man-made causes.…”