From Management to Stewardship: Viewing Forests As Complex Adaptive Systems in an Uncertain World

TLDR

Forests worldwide confront unprecedented biological, political, social, and climatic challenges, and existing management approaches—focused on limited production goals and rigid control—fail to address rapid change without a global scientific framework. The authors contend that treating forest ecosystems as complex adaptive systems offers a superior strategy for balancing production and conservation objectives. They outline broad principles that expand the sustained‑yield, single‑good paradigm and introduce policy incentives to foster self‑organization and integrated social‑ecological adaptation, thereby enhancing forest adaptive capacity.

Abstract

Abstract The world's forests and forestry sector are facing unprecedented biological, political, social, and climatic challenges. The development of appropriate, novel forest management and restoration approaches that adequately consider uncertainty and adaptability are hampered by a continuing focus on production of a few goods or objectives, strong control of forest structure and composition, and most importantly the absence of a global scientific framework and long‐term vision. Ecosystem‐based approaches represent a step in the right direction, but are limited in their ability to deal with the rapid pace of social, climatic, and environmental changes. We argue here that viewing forest ecosystems as complex adaptive system provides a better alternative for both production‐ and conservation‐oriented forests and forestry. We propose a set of broad principles and changes to increase the adaptive capacity of forests in the face of future uncertainties. These span from expanding the sustained‐yield, single‐good paradigm to developing policy incentives and interventions that promote self‐organization and integrated social‐ecological adaptation.