Abstract
Water and forests are inextricably linked. Pressures on forests from population growth and climate change are increasing risks to forests and their aquatic ecosystem services (AES). There is a need to incorporate AES in forest management but there is considerable uncertainty about how to do so. Approaches that manage forest ecosystem services such as fiber, water and carbon sequestration independently ignore the inherent complexities of ecosystem services and their responses to management actions, with the potential for unintended consequences that are difficult to predict. The ISO 31000 Risk Management Standard is a standardized framework to assess risks to forest AES and to prioritize management strategies to manage risks within tolerable ranges. The framework consists of five steps: establishing the management context, identifying, analyzing, evaluating and treating the risks. Challenges to implementing the framework include the need for novel models and indicators to assess forest change and resilience, quantification of linkages between forest practice and AES, and the need for an integrated systems approach to assess cumulative effects and stressors on forest ecosystems and AES. In the face of recent international agreements to protect forests, there are emerging opportunities for international leadership to address these challenges in order to protect both forests and AES.
Highlights
We believe that forests are important for the water supply of humanity—Statement by participants of the Kunming Expert Meeting on forests and water, March 2014.Forests are critical to human well-being, yet the loss of forest to other land uses has been extensive and much of the world’s remaining forest is unprotected or degraded [1]
Now is the time to act to ensure that we develop appropriate strategies and supporting science to integrate aquatic ecosystem services (AES) in forest management policies and practices
The purpose of this paper is to present the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) framework and show how it could be used to analyze the main characteristics of the integrated forest-AES system
Summary
We believe that forests are important for the water supply of humanity—Statement by participants of the Kunming Expert Meeting on forests and water, March 2014. Goals 6 (recognizing the role of forests in ensuring sustainable and secure water supplies) and 15 (protecting, restoring and promoting sustainable use of forests and ecosystems and their services) highlight the importance of managing forests for water and other ES to promote resilient landscapes and communities [2] Despite these initiatives, a systematic integration of forest AES into management decisions remains lacking. We need a better understanding of: (1) how human activities affect the ecosystem and the production of AES; (2) how the supply and demand for AES interact at different scales and how this information can be integrated into decision-making; (3) how to quantify the magnitude of AES benefits so that the trade-offs of alternative forest management strategies can be understood and ranked; and (4) how to turn AES values into effective incentive and finance mechanisms at a large enough scale to have an impact [34].
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