Transitioning towards multifunctional forest landscapes: Learning through evaluation as a solution

Expectations of what natural forests and cultural woodlands should provide vary among locations, stakeholder groups, and over time. Developing multifunctional forest landscapes requires understanding of the spatio-temporal dynamic roles of traditions and cultural legacies in social-ecological systems. Using Sweden as an example, this presentation explores the emergence of even-aged silvicultural traditions focusing on sustained yield of wood, and the importance of applying different vantage points in social-ecological systems to identify barriers and levers, which can support transitions towards multifunctional forest landscapes. I identify levers from three groups of vantage points. They are: (1) the biosphere, with biodiversity as short-hand for forest composition, structure and function as supporters of human well-being; (2) society, comprising stakeholder interactions across local to global levels, and (3) economy, represented by value chain hierarchies and currencies. I will show how the intensive wood production offered by even-aged silviculture (established >200 years ago) led to a conflict between forest ecosystem values – sustained yield wood production and biodiversity – fuelled by lack of shared knowledge of their differences and similarities. A review of six groups of stakeholders’ insights highlights inequalities in income and power distribution across governance levels, effectively marginalising less powerful actors. This is further complicated by the spatio-temporal dynamics of financial outcomes along the value chain, and by the impossibility of attributing monetary value to all forest ecosystem services. A review of cultural trajectories in pan-European forest management illustrates that forest history patterns repeat themselves and legacies of even-aged silviculture are resistant to change. Shifting to multifunctional forest landscapes requires several forest management systems and landscape planning. This requires learning through evaluation of multiple forest values and learning of different forest owners’ and users’ preferences. Another key solution will be to handle the manufacturing of doubt and decay of truth, which diminish the role of evidence and systems analyses in political and civic discourses. Actual change will also require strong external drivers. Finally, longitudinal transdisciplinary case studies across countries and regions can help foster holistic multi-dimensional and multilevel systems thinking.