Linking Social Resilience and Biodiversity Across Global Forests

Intensified climate change and anthropogenic pressures have rendered forests increasingly vulnerable to disturbances such as droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and land-use change, leading to complex social, ecological, and economic impacts. Forests are social-ecological systems that provide numerous services to humans and co-evolve with human activities, governance, and management practices. Therefore, forest resilience, its capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from disturbances, depends not only on ecological processes but also on social and institutional conditions. However, most studies investigating forest resilience have primarily focused on biophysical dimensions, with limited attention given to social aspects.

To address this gap, the current study proposes a new framework for assessing social resilience in forests by operationalizing key social resilience principles, which include fostering complex adaptive system thinking (P4), encouraging learning and experimentation (P5), broadening participation (P6), and promoting polycentric governance (P7). Relevant social, economic, and governance indicators were identified through a literature review and global datasets. These indicators were then standardized to ensure equal weighting priority regardless of their original scale. To manage multicollinearity and eliminate redundant indicators, the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) analysis was performed, and the final selection of indicators was guided by theoretical relevance and balanced domain representation. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was then applied to derive indicator weights, and a social resilience value was calculated and spatially mapped as a weighted sum of standardized indicators.

Applying this framework at the global scale reveals clear spatial patterns in social resilience across forest regions. The results show that high social resilience is concentrated in parts of Europe, North America, and Australia, while low resilience clusters appear in several tropical and developing regions, including parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Amazon Basin, and Central Africa. When comparing social resilience with biodiversity, mismatches can be observed in tropical regions where highly biodiverse forests coincide with communities that have low social resilience and institutional capacity. These regions emerge as hotspots of vulnerability to climate and anthropogenic pressures, including drought, fire, deforestation, and socio-economic disturbances. This misalignment highlights the importance of considering social and institutional capacity when designing and implementing climate and biodiversity policies, as ecological effectiveness is likely to depend on local governance, social capital, and adaptive capacity, as well as on whether interventions are aligned with local needs, knowledge, and institutional capacity to coordinate, learn, and respond to change.