Using scenarios for forest adaptation to climate change: a foresight study of the Landes de Gascogne Forest 2050

Abstract

To ensure that forest ecosystem services will be maintained in future climate conditions, the challenge of developing and implementing forest adaptation strategies has become a priority shared across Europe (European Commission 2010) and around the world (FAO 2012). A critical aspect of any adaptation (and mitigation) strategy is to ensure that management choices have sufficient flexibility and are consistent with sustainable forest management (SFM) principles that balance the forest’s social, ecological and economic outputs. Most current studies, however, still tend to consider forest adaptation independently of exogenous developments (Seppala et al. 2009), or are based on forecasting and thus only extrapolate from current trends. Yet the futures of forest systems are also uncertain because change may come mainly from socio-economic, and not ecological, drivers (Schoene and Bernier 2012). Climate change will, moreover, have a highly uncertain effect on socio-ecological systems such as forests. A number of authors and international publications on the environment have posited that scenarios studies offer a framework for dealing with strong uncertainties and the complexity of socio-ecological systems: “Comparisons among a set of contrasting scenarios are used to understand the systemic interrelation and dynamics of complex socioecological systems and to define a range of possibilities and uncertainties in quantitative and qualitative terms” (Thompson et al. 2012). Likewise, SFM practices are beginning to underscore the importance of taking into account landscapelevel views of the forest, and of the many exogenous drivers of regional change, when thinking about integrated land use (Schoene and Bernier 2012). Adaptation strategies must therefore move away from single technical solutions and must not rely on one-size-fits-all mechanisms. New modes of governance that enable rapidly accelerating social, economic and institutional changes are required (Seppala et al. 2009). Recent emphasis has also been placed on the importance of implementing regionally based forest adaptation strategies that are accepted by local stakeholders (Spathelf et al. 2013). A scenario planning approach that engages stakeholders in scenario development could be a way to overcome such Handling Editor: Marc Hanewinkel