Abstract
The role of forest management in mitigating climate change is a central concern for the Canadian province of British Columbia. The successful implementation of forest management activities to achieve climate change mitigation in British Columbia will be strongly influenced by public support or opposition. While we now have increasingly clear ideas of the management opportunities associated with forest mitigation and some insight into public support for climate change mitigation in the context of sustainable forest management, very little is known with respect to the levels and basis of public support for potential forest management strategies to mitigate climate change. This paper, by describing the results of a web-based survey, documents levels of public support for the implementation of eight forest carbon mitigation strategies in British Columbia’s forest sector, and examines and quantifies the influence of the factors that shape this support. Overall, respondents ascribed a high level of importance to forest carbon mitigation and supported all of the eight proposed strategies, indicating that the British Columbia public is inclined to consider alternative practices in managing forests and wood products to mitigate climate change. That said, we found differences in levels of support for the mitigation strategies. In general, we found greater levels of support for a rehabilitation strategy (e.g. reforestation of unproductive forest land), and to a lesser extent for conservation strategies (e.g. old growth conservation, reduced harvest) over enhanced forest management strategies (e.g. improved harvesting and silvicultural techniques). We also highlighted multiple variables within the British Columbia population that appear to play a role in predicting levels of support for conservation and/or enhanced forest management strategies, including environmental values, risk perception, trust in groups of actors, prioritized objectives of forest management and socio-demographic factors.
Highlights
In recent years, the upsurge of attention to climate change has placed forests and their central role in the carbon cycle at the forefront of attention
While we have increasingly clear ideas of the management opportunities associated with forest mitigation in British Columbia [7, 15] and in Canada [3, 16,17,18], and some insight into public support for climate change mitigation in the context of sustainable forest management [14], very little is known with respect to the levels and basis of public support for potential forest management strategies to mitigate climate change
A large proportion of our respondents believe that climate change is mostly or partly caused by human activities (90.5%), which is considerably higher than in the United States (57%) [61] or the estimate recently calculated for British Columbia (BC) (62%) [77]
Summary
The upsurge of attention to climate change has placed forests and their central role in the carbon cycle at the forefront of attention. The acceptance of new resource management and climate policies often rely on the need for the general public to understand, accept and perceive them as effective, fair and legitimate [9, 10]. This is the case for BC’s forests, which have been since the 1980’s at the center of disputes over their management and conservation (e.g., Clayoquot Sound, Great Bear Rainforest [11, 12]). No study to date has explored public opinion regarding forest management strategies designed for their potential to mitigate climate change and the factors that influence their acceptance. This paper is the first to examine and document the level of support in the BC population at large and examine how demographic characteristics as well as explanatory variables derived from the literature on cognitive and value-based dimensions of risk perception (i.e., environmental values, knowledge, trust in decision-makers, perceived climate risks and preferred objectives of forest management) influence support for different types of mitigation strategies
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