Abstract
This research serves to integrate the concept of an “ecological footprint” into future-oriented forest management scenarios. Scenarios are commonly used to explore stakeholder perceptions of possible forest futures, and are typically focused on the local impacts of different management choices. This article illustrates how global footprint analysis can be incorporated into scenarios to enable local forest stakeholders in the EU to consider the impacts of their local decisions at national and global levels. This illustration could be helpful to the construction of a forest decision support system that includes wood trade information and social processes (simulation of management decisions under changing political/economic conditions). It finds that different future forest management scenarios involving a potential increase or decrease of the harvested timber, or potential increase or decrease of subsidies for forest protection, combined with various possible changes in local consumption patterns, might have impact on both “internal” (local) and “external” (non-local) forest footprints.
Highlights
It has been estimated that by the year 2007 humanity was consuming 1.5 times the resources that the earth had produced in a single year (Ewing et al, 2010)
The concept of global footprints provides one tool for local forest stakeholders to begin to think about the impacts of their local decisions across scales
This includes quantitative calculations which can be applied at various scales to compare apparent consumption of forest products to the earth’s “biocapacity” to supply those products
Summary
It has been estimated that by the year 2007 humanity was consuming 1.5 times the resources that the earth had produced in a single year (Ewing et al, 2010). Moderate UN scenarios, involving low population growth and small improvements in diet, suggest that by 2050 we will require two Earths to support us over the long term (Ibid). International trade is playing an increasing role in the rise of global consumption. As countries gain in wealth they decrease their relative reliance on domestic resource extraction, while increasing their overall consumption and reliance on foreign imports. Wiedmann et al (2013) define “material footprints” (MF) in terms of the global allocation of raw materials
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