Sustainability Impact Assessment of Forest Operations: a Review

Abstract

Purpose of Review One of the challenges of forest operations is to consider the consequences of different management strategies and to estimate the economic, environmental and social performance of different processes, products, or services. From the methods available to quantify the impact of alternative forest management, we selected the method of Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA), an iterative process that includes the analysis of the societal, environmental, and economic sustainability pillars and offers a wider assessment framework, which is useful for stakeholders and policy makers. The purpose of this review is to identify the state of the art and trends of SIA in forest operations. Recent Findings There are few studies including all pillars of sustainability and most of the studies consider different aspects of environmental or economic impacts. It is important to determine the system boundaries and select the appropriate indicators in order to have a comprehensive SIA. Different harvesting technologies and their deployment can influence costs, productivity, environment, and safety risk. Some indicators, such as cost and productivity, can vary between countries and different scenarios. Summary Efficient machines, appropriate technical systems, innovative products, and up-to date training of operators can have a positive impact on sustainability. Economic factors can change at a rapid pace, and new machines can play a positive role in forest operations (e.g., lower fuel consumption, higher level of safety and comfort for operators). The inclusion of indicators measuring the extra value of the forest should be considered. We suggest adopting sensitivity analysis during the assessment of key processes to observe the effect on the hot spots.

Sustainability Assessment of Alternative Strip Clear Cutting Operations for Wood Chip Production in Renaturalization Management of Pine Stands

“…Recent studies have shown that that there are few studies related to FO considering all pillars of sustainability [38]. Most studies are focused only on either environmental or on economic and environmental aspects.…”

“…In a modern and multifunctional forestry, in which society is asking for sustainable forestry and naturalistic forest management [7], FO should ideally be carried out in a sustainable manner and thus, support the concept of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) [18,37,38]. It aims to improve economic, but also environmental and social performances of forest processes, products and/or ecosystem services.…”

A Decade of Forest Engineering: Achievements and Future Directions

“…While retaining their crucial role, conventional statistics are increasingly bolstered by new analytical techniques better suited to reflect the complexity of the systems under investigation. As interest expanded beyond the productivity and cost of a single machine or team, so did the toolbox of the Forest Engineer, which has led to the widespread use of multi-criteria approaches, including Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) [18], sustainability impact assessment [19,20] and multi-criteria analysis [21]. As they reflect the complexity of strategic issues, the insights obtained with these methods are of specific interest to policy-makers, which illustrates a steady shift in terms of intended users.…”

Assessment of the Profitability of Environmental Activities in Forestry

“…The environmental aspect of sustainable forestry development implies the preservation of the environment, the biological diversity of forest ecosystems, the rational use of natural resources, the protection of the atmosphere, land, subsoil, forests, water, and the ecologically safe use of biotechnology (Goals 6,12,13,15). The economic aspect reflects the balance of economic interests of the main subjects of forest relations: the state, the owner of the forests, forest users, the management authorities of forests at all levels and the public (Goals 2,3,7,8,12) [5].…”

“…Indeed, these environmental pressures may often remain external to the companies and would not be accounted for in such traditional performance measures as, e.g., financial indicators. The environmental measures (and the associated EPIs) can be measured in a number of ways [7][8][9]. In particular, EPIs are designed to describe such issues as pollution, biodiversity, climate, energy use, erosion, ecosystem services, and environmental education, among others [10,11].…”