Abstract
Various national policies guide forest use, but often with competing policy objectives leading to divergent management paradigms. Incoherent policies may negatively impact the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem services (FES), and forest multifunctionality. There is uncertainty among policymakers about the impacts of policies on the real world. We translated the policy documents of Finland into scenarios including the quantitative demands for FES, representing: the national forest strategy (NFS), the biodiversity strategy (BDS), and the bioeconomy strategy (BES). We simulated a Finland-wide systematic sample of forest stands with alternative management regimes and climate change. Finally, we used multi-objective optimization to identify the combination of management regimes matching best with each policy scenario and analysed their long-term effects on FES.The NFS scenario proved to be the most multifunctional, targeting the highest number of FES, while the BES had the lowest FES targets. However, the NFS was strongly oriented towards the value chain of wood and bioenergy and had a dominating economic growth target, which caused strong within-policy conflicts and hindered reaching biodiversity targets. The BDS and BES scenarios were instead more consistent but showed either sustainability gaps in terms of providing timber resources (BDS) or no improvements in forest biodiversity (BES). All policy scenarios resulted in forest management programs dominated by continuous cover forestry, set-aside areas, and intensive management zones, with proportions depending on the policy focus. Our results highlight for the first time the conflicts among national sectoral policies in terms of management requirements and effects on forest multifunctionality. The outcomes provide leverage points for policymakers to increase coherence among future policies and improve implementation of multiple uses of forests.
Highlights
Forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services demanded by the society, like wood and non-wood forest goods as provisioning services, carbon storage, nutrient and water cycles as regulating services, as well as cultural services like recreation
national forest strategy (NFS) received the maximum proportion of business as usual (BAU) (3.4%), which slightly decreased with increasing climate change
setting aside (SA), continuous cover forestry (CCF), and Intensified BAU (IBAU) was assigned the highest area shares across all optimized scenarios, which means a segregation in forest management across the forest landscapes
Summary
Forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services demanded by the society, like wood and non-wood forest goods as provisioning services, carbon storage, nutrient and water cycles as regulating services, as well as cultural services like recreation. Forests play a key role for biodiversity conservation (Forest Europe, 2020; MEA, 2005; Wolf slehner et al, 2019) These societal benefits, commonly referred to as forest ecosystem services (FES), have become the focus of a number of European policies (Bouwma et al, 2018; EASAC, 2017; Primmer et al, 2021). The new EU biodiversity strategy promotes an increase in sustainable management and forest resilience against climate change. It aims to protect 30% of the EU’s land area, out of which 10% are strictly protected, including all remaining primary and old-growth forests (EC, 2020). The lack of policy coherence is expected to create undesired trade-offs among FES, which in turn may decrease sustainability (Nabuurs et al, 2019; Nilsson et al, 2012; Winkel and Sotirov, 2015), due to the uncertainty of climate change, which strongly affects European forests (Hanewinkel et al, 2013; Lindner et al, 2010; McDowell et al, 2020)
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