Guidelines for risk management in forest planning — what is risk and when is risk management useful?

Managing forest resources occurs under various sources of uncertainty. Depending on the management problem, this uncertainty may have a substantial impact on the quality of the solution. As our knowledge on the sources and magnitude of uncertainty improves, integrating this knowledge into the development of management plans becomes increasingly useful, as additional information can improve the decision-making process. This adjustment requires a fundamental shift in how planning problems are viewed: instead of interpreting risk management as a technique needed only for addressing problems with natural hazards, risk management should be an integral part of most planning problems. Managing risks can be linked to a variety of adaptive planning methods: to help mitigate risk, either plans should be revised as new information becomes available or the possibility of adaptation should be accounted for in preparing the plans. We conduct a brief examination of the key topics in risk management and highlight how risk management implies trade-offs. Several decision problems that incorporate risk management are analyzed, and alternative perspectives for the problem are suggested to better address risk management issues. We then provide a decision framework for considering how to integrate risk management practices into the forest planning process.