Risk Aversion and Timber Harvest Strategies: A Case Study of Nonindustrial Private Forest Management in Louisiana

Forest owners face many challenges regarding forest management due to the long period from planting to harvest. Along with the economic and environmental factors that influence management actions, the owners' attitude to risk plays a crucial role in forest management decisions. This study shows that understanding the effects of the owner's risk preference for management actions is an important step to form an effective forest policy. The objectives of the study are to (1) assess the economic advantage of forest management alternatives over a range of risk aversion coefficients and (2) determine the financial incentive (risk premium) corresponding to a forest owners' risk attitude. We implemented the stochastic efficiency with respect to a function framework to evaluate a set of fertilization, herbicide, and thinning management alternatives at mid-rotation loblolly pine plantations in Louisiana. Results from this study indicate that forest owner's risk preference affects their decision to select management actions. Financial incentives are substantially different for specific management alternatives between risk-neutral and risk-averse forest owners. The results can guide forest policy development where agencies can modify financial assistance programs to improve the adoption of management actions.

Uphill Battle: Forest Rights and Restoration on Podu Landscapes in Keonjhar, Odisha

In response to the global climate emergency and biodiversity loss, environmental advocates promote ecological restoration of millions of hectares of the world’s degraded forest lands. Lands of high value to restoration are home to nearly 300 million people, including 12% of low- and middle-income country populations. In this article, I respond to calls for greater empirical investigation into the social impacts of forest landscape restoration. Through spatial and ethnographic analysis of forest restoration in Keonjhar, Odisha (India), I show that state-led afforestation efforts contradict a decade of forest tenure reform which sought to decentralize and decolonize forest governance. I explore how state-led efforts ignore (and inhibit) the continued protagonism of forest-dwelling communities in forest regeneration on their customary lands. Weaving accounts from 1992 onwards across six villages and 22 plantations, I characterize state strategies as an ‘uphill battle’: by systematically selecting shifting cultivation (podu) uplands for enclosure and tree plantation, forest agencies contribute to a lose-lose situation where neither forest restoration nor forest rights are realized. Investigating this process from colonial forest policy to the present, I leverage a critical political ecology perspective that supports calls for rights-based restoration.

POLITIK EKOLOGI KEHUTANAN: KEBIJAKAN HUTAN TANAMAN INDUSTRI DI SAMBELIA, LOMBOK TIMUR

Ecological politics rely solely on economic interest. Development and the environment have a complicated correlation. The industrial plantation forest policy aims to ensure that the economic benefit goes hand in hand with the sustainability demand. Ironically, this policy triggers a conflict between local communities and corporations as the holder of forest concession rights. The concession is practically established due to merely economic interest aligned with the extractive industry of tobacco in Lombok. The plantation is aimed as the supporting source for the tobacco industry since it requires specific woods to roast the tobacco. The study refers to utilizes instrumental state theory and deep ecology perspective to identify how the policy was made for the capital and tobacco capital benefits, while the sustainability objective is left behind. The study shows not only how the concession sparked ironic economic development, but also how the liberal environmentalism approach in industrial forest plantation policy has failed to gain its objective. The economic potential of tobacco in Lombok is the main determinant in industrial forest plantation policy that changes community forests into private forests. In the end, the policy was strategically implemented to sustain production and strengthen corporation monopoly over forests.

‘Back to the Future’—Oak wood-pasture for wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean

In the summer of 2021, enormous wildfires in the Mediterranean eliminated huge areas of mainly coniferous forest, destroyed adjacent settlements and claimed the lives of many people. The fires indicate effects of climate change and expose consequences of rural demographic changes, deficits in regional and touristic development planning and shortcomings in forest policy. This forum article highlights the dimensions of the problem, calls for a paradigm shift and shows solutions. Land abandonment, woody plant encroachment and non-reflective afforestation are leading to increasing amounts of combustible biomass. To prevent disastrous fires in future, fundamental changes in tree species composition, forest structure and management are essential. Plantations of reseeding pines are to be substituted by spacious or periodically open woodlands of long-lived trees with resprouting capacity such as Mediterranean oaks. Biomass-reducing practices including wood-pasture have to be revived in rural and peri-urban areas. Exemplary fire-resistant multifunctional oak woodlands occur throughout the Mediterranean. Urgent and medium-term measures in the burnt areas include promoting natural ecosystem regeneration, developing regionalized seed banks and nurseries to support native genetic resources, fostering vegetation mosaics of groves and multiple-use open and coppice woodland maintained by traditional practices, and in general forest management aiming at fuel biomass reduction and a policy counteracting land abandonment.

Importance-Performance Analysis of Mountain Village Promotion Projects in the Forest Sector by Upper-Level Local Governments

Background and objective: Due to the recent crisis of extinction in local areas, the mountain village promotion policy is recognized as an important task. This study examined the priorities of major policy projects in the forest sector that affect mountain village promotion.Methods: For research methods, literature search, expert advisory meetings, and a survey were conducted. The survey was conducted on 42 policy stakeholders from June 1 to August 13, 2021. The literature search was based on policy projects in the forest sector by 8 upper-level local governments including mountain villages. For questionnaire items, 173 forest policy projects were classified into 27 types through expert review, and the importance and performance of each type were rated on a 5-point Likert scale. Paired t-test, IPA, Locus for Focus model, and Borich needs assessment were used as the analysis methods, and the statistical program SPSS 21.0 was used as the analytical tool.Results: The results showed that ‘creating forest-related jobs’ and ‘supporting cultivation of professional forestry workers’ both showed high importance and performance, implying that they would show an effect in mountain village promotion. ‘Creating forests for environmental improvement’, ‘discovering forest cultural assets’ ‘establishing and boosting forest tourism’, ‘providing forest therapy services’, ‘creating forest-related jobs’, ‘supporting community revitalization’, and ‘urban-rural exchanges’ were found to be the types that needed improvement and concentration for mountain village promotion. In particular, ‘creating forests for environmental improvement' and ‘discovering forest cultural assets’ were derived as priority considerations for mountain village promotion policies.Conclusion: In summary, it was found that in order to promote mountain villages, various content projects must be improved and carried out to enhance the physical environment and revitalize mountain villages.

Researching conferences as spaces of valuation: a pragmatic approach

Scientific conferences are not only sites of knowledge exchange and networking. They are also spaces of valuation that are constitutive of epistemic cultures. At conferences, scholars (re-) negotiate what counts as good research, what kind of scholarship is considered valuable and which epistemic properties matter for their field. This negotiation sometimes happens explicitly, but more often through evaluative acts: statements of reasoning and justification, questions and remarks, and evaluative emotional utterances that include literal and figurative expressions of appreciation, scepticism, rejection, etc. Combining conference ethnography with a pragmatic approach borrowing insights from linguistics offers a way to identify and interpret such evaluative acts in conference talk. An analysis of data from the 3rd International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM3), a virtual event with participants from across the globe, serves as illustrative case. Text materials generated through observing participation (field notes, transcripts, chat comments and abstracts) show how forest policy researchers ascribe worth to studies characterised by methodical rigour and praxis orientation, and guided by an objectivistic ideal of science. However, the latter was also challenged by panelists who enthusiatically appraised reflexive research that acknowledged the role of emotions in knowledge production.The IFPM3 case shows that conferences offer a unique space for observing academic valuation practice. Exploring how scholars enact values through conference discourse will not only help to better understand the specificities of particular research fields and their epistemic cultures. It can also more generally enhance the understanding of how social and epistemic levels in science intersect.

Forest Management Assessment of Biodiversity in the Taiga Zone

The need to preserve biodiversity has been recognized for decades, even centuries in North America, Europe and some other regions of the world. importance of preserving species and wildlife areas is emphasized in many cultures. Preservation of biodiversity in forest management, and especially in industrial logging, is one of the most important tasks of modern forestry. In many countries with the developed forest complex (Finland, Sweden, etc.), the task of preserving natural biodiversity has the same priority in the state forest policy as providing the forest industry with wood raw materials. The main requirements for the biodiversity preservation in Russia are enshrined in the National Standard (Forest Code of the Russian Federation, article 1) governing Voluntary Forest Certification. Organization of forest management in the Vologda region is carried out with consideration of significant aspects of biodiversity preservation. The research purpose is the forestry and economic assessment of biodiversity at the local level in the taiga zone (case study of the Vologda region). The assessment was carried out based on the inventory characteristic obtained in the field studies. The methodological provisions of E.A. Rai and S.I. Slastnikov were used to perform economic assessment of the preservation of key objects. A comparison of the costs of timber logging in biotopes and the income from its sale (in the case of logging stands in key biotopes with the subsequent sale of the resulting timber) showed significant differences between the objects under consideration. It is shown that according to the assortment structure, a significant part of the studied biotopes accrue to firewood. The cost of timber varies from 9.6 to 529.5 ths rubles. The amount of costs at different sites will vary significantly from 9.0 to 340.5 ths rubles due to the possible cutting of key biotopes. At the same time, a negative financial result is observed only at one site (a forest site with a habitat of Neckera pennata, which is included in the Red Data Book of the Vologda Region). The results demonstrate that the allocation of key sites and their further preservation is environmentally sound, but in some cases (when compared with the income from their cutting) is not commercially justified. For citation: Korchagov S.A., Khamitov R.S., Gribov S.E., Ivanova M.G., Belyakov D.V. Forest Management Assessment of Biodiversity in the Taiga Zone. Lesnoy Zhurnal [Russian Forestry Journal], 2021, no. 6, pp. 110–120. DOI: 10.37482/0536-1036-2021-6-110-120

Delivery of Ecosystem Services by Community Woodland Groups and Their Networks

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment stresses that it is possible to manage ecosystems so as to strengthen their capacity to provide a range of goods and services. In reality, the delivery of ecosystem services reflects policy and delivery mechanisms, the environment, and the objectives of landowners and managers. Amid gradual changes to forest policy and more recent periods of austerity, the management of treescapes by locally led groups, such as Community Woodland Groups (CWGs), has become increasingly common. Through document analysis and interviews we explore the objectives and activities of British-based CWGs, and the implications these have for the delivery of ecosystem services. Additionally, we explore CWGs involvement with three types of networks and the ways in which each facilitate CWGs’ establishment, operations and ecosystem service provision. We conclude that, while CWGs are capable of delivering a range of ecosystem services, their focus is typically on: (i) cultural services for the benefit of the local community, and (ii) biodiversity. Since these foci parallel the goods and services emphasised in contemporary forest policy agendas, it is apparent that CWGs represent a promising model for woodland management. However, to realise their potential and confront management challenges, CWGs often rely on access to advice, labour, equipment and funding from across multiple networks.

Inflation of wood resources in European forests: The footprints of a big-bang

The current increase in European forest resources forms a singularity across the globe. Whether this trend will persist, and how biological and economic trends feature it form crucial issues to green economy challenges and C sequestration. The present screening of Forest Europe 2015 statistics explored the features, inertia and limits of this expansion, and its relationships with countries’ development, forest management and trade, intense in this area of the world. Persisting footprint of past demographic pressure on forests was identified, with opposed traces on their area and growing stock density. Steady growing stock (GS) increases, proportional to GS, not density-limited, and sustained by forest area increases, supported the view of an inflationary forest dynamic. Economic development and liberalism fostered both forest exploitation and production, yielding no significant impact on GS changes. Wood exports exerted a tension on forest exploitation and GS changes, thus lowering GS inflation but providing a resource security margin in the face of expected climate threats. Conflicting a common view, GS inflation and moderate felling-to-increment ratios make increased use of wood resources and C sequestration reconcilable, and GS expansion timely for ongoing EU forest policy processes. Anticipated adverse impacts of ongoing climate change were not clearly identified in these statistics.

Comparative analysis of regulatory framework related to private forest management in Slovenia and Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Forest policy and forest ownership patterns in Slovenia and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) have changed considerably in recent decades due to unprecedented scale of social, political and economic change. The distribution of ownership types varies between the countries – in Slovenia private forest ownership predominates (77%), while in FBiH only about 20% of forest is private-owned. In both countries, private forest properties are small-scale and fragmented, which affects management opportunities and the scale at which policy interventions need to be made. This paper analyses the Slovenian and Central Bosnia Cantonal Law on Forests to assess how the regulatory framework affects private forest owners’ (PFOs) rights, forest management and accelerates cooperation of PFOs. Both laws impose exclusive rights and responsibilities of PFOs, as well as limitation on how they can use their forests. In both countries, legislation contains detailed regulations for forest management activities and stipulate that mandatory forest management plans (FMPs) are an important tool that supports the implementation of sustainable forest management. In Slovenia, FMPs are prepared as common plans for all forests regardless the ownership, while in FBiH the Cantonal Law prescribes a separate forest management planning system for private forests. To improve the efficiency of private forest management, both laws support voluntary cooperation of PFOs. From the analysis, it can be concluded that there is a need for better harmonisation of public and private interests in relation to forest resources, especially in the case of FBiH, and that the deregulation of property right is needed as well as that the level of involvement of PFOs in the forest policy making process is unsatisfactory, in most cases only formal.