Abstract
Sweden is not on track to meet its own national 2020 environmental goals for sustainable forests. Due to the deliberate design of Swedish forest policy, private forest owners’ voluntary forest and biodiversity protection efforts are required to help close the policy gap. Using survey data from Swedish family forest owners, this paper outlines how forest owner attitudes reveal challenges and opportunities for two general strategies to increasing forest and biodiversity protection. The first strategy is attempting to institute changes within status quo Swedish forest policy by relying on family forest owners to make such changes voluntarily. The second strategy is encouraging management changes by using policy reforms. Our qualitative results suggest that Swedish forest policy is close to the limit of what can be accomplished with volunteerism alone and likely requires policy reforms to close its forest and biodiversity protection gap on family-owned forests.
Highlights
Biodiversity loss is a global challenge, recognized in the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD, 1992) and in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Bron dizio et al, 2019)
While the data we present does not explicitly ask family forest owners their opinions about the technical fixes outlined in Felton et al (2019), we propose that family forest owner attitudes concerning environmental regulations in the Swedish Forestry Model in general can give an indi cation of how family forest owners would react to additional structural fixes per se, such as taxes, subsidies, or voluntary stewardship programs
Our results show possibilities and chal lenges for implementing these and other changes to the Swedish Forestry Model using two strategies to increase forest and biodiversity protection on Swedish family-owned forestlands
Summary
Biodiversity loss is a global challenge, recognized in the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD, 1992) and in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Bron dizio et al, 2019). Once viewed as a pioneer in environmental and sustainable development policy (Eckerberg and Bjarstig, 2020; Eckerberg, 2010; Hysing, 2014; Kronsell, 1997, 2002), has lately been considered less successful in terms of reaching conservation targets for biodiversity (OECD, 2014). Recent evaluations concluded that Sweden is not on track to meet its own national 2020 environmental goals for sustainable forests (SEPA, 2019). A key reason for the low proportion of formally protected land in Sweden is due to deregulations in the mid-1990s that consider discretionary, voluntary set-asides of forests by private owners to be protected lands in calculating forest conservation targets (Lister, 2011). 235,000–500,000 ha) need to be set aside from production to meet Sweden’s forest protection target (Danley, 2019a). Swe den is falling short of its own forest protection and biodiversity goals and is, by intentional design, dependent on private forest owners to help close its forest protection gap
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