Canadian Forest Policy Adapting To Change

Arguing that the complexity of policy-making in the forest sector has led many analysts to focus exclusively on specific sectoral activities or jurisdictions, this collection of essays offers a simplifying framework of analysis.

With more than three quarters of Canada's forests under provincial control, provincial forest policies are crucial for encouraging the sustainable management of the nation's forests. Forest tenures, which allow private companies to manage public forest resources, are the key policy tool that provinces use to balance the requirements of sustainable management with the economic concerns of the forest industry. By offering an up-to-date comparative examination of contemporary provincial forestry policies, this book provides forest managers, policy-makers, scholars, and students with the information and concepts to critically examine Canada’s complex forest tenure systems. The authors look at tenure, stumpage fees, and other forest practices to assess how well different provincial schemes achieve the goals of sustainable forest management. They identify a number of essential policy attributes that could be used to guide tenure reform, consider potential barriers that could prevent meaningful change, and offer much-needed practical guidance on overcoming these obstacles.

This is the report of a workshop held to provide a forum for the exchange of information on both the expected impacts of climate change on Canada's western & northern forests, and potential adaptive strategies. Topics covered in presentations & poster sessions included climate change science and the implications of climate change for environmental, social, & economic values of the forest. Facilitated interactive sessions focussed on knowledge gaps, policy, and institutional barriers to adaptation, followed by suggestions for moving the climate change impacts & adaptation agenda forward in the forest sector.

Forest managers can expect the unexpected and they can expect that change will be ongoing and unrelenting. Some general recommendations for beginning to address climate change in Canada's forest sector include enhancing the capacity to undertake integrated assessment of vulnerabilities to climate change at various scales; increasing resources to monitor the impacts of climate change; increasing resources for impacts and adaptation science; reviewing forest policies, forest planning, forest management approaches, and institutions to assess our ability to achieve social objectives under climate change; embedding principles of risk management and adaptive management into forest management; and maintaining or improving the capacity for communicating, networking, and information sharing with the Canadian public and within the forest sector."--Pub. website.

Climate change is an unprecedented issue in modern times, posing a number of challenges to sustainable forest management (SFM) in Canada. These challenges include how best to plan and adapt for an uncertain future. The Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM) has recognized the need to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities that climate change presents for Canada's forests and forest sector and has therefore initiated collaborative, interjurisdictional work on adaptation in forestry. This report briefly characterizes the issue of climate change as it relates to SFM in Canada and outlines the importance and benefits of adaptation for Canada's forest sector. Additionally, it presents the CCFM approach for adapting SFM to a changing climate and summarizes a suite of tools and products that the CCFM has developed to enhance the capacity of the Canadian forest sector to adapt to climatic changes.--Document.

Canada's forests are home to well over many interactions and feedbacks in the life cycle of a 100 species of trees, of which 93 are commercially tree add to the complexity of climate change effects. [...] This Adaptation to climate change by modifying forest means that Canada is committed to maintaining forests management policies and practices can potentially and ecological processes in order to ensure that the reduce the vulnerability of some tree species to socio-economic and environmental benefits that are climate change. [...] The remainder of this section provides an overview of the major forest ecozones in Canada (Figure 1), the typical climate of these ecozones, and the major tree species that are present in each. [...] In general, tree species cannot rapidly invade provided an approach for determining the vulnerability new areas because of the time required for trees of tree species to climate change based on aspects of to grow to seed-bearing age and then produce and tree genetics2. [...] Landscape-scale effects of climate change and of interest as a means of predicting (in a general way) fire will be addressed in the next phase of the CCFM the effects of future fire regimes on species composi- project.

This book brings together the work of over twenty-five researchers to provide a comparative and empirically rich portrait of community forestry policy and practice in Canada. Tackling all forestry regions from Newfoundland to British Columbia, it unearths the history of community forestry across the nation, demonstrating strong regional differences tied to patterns of policy-making and cultural traditions. Case studies reveal innovative practices in governance and ecological management but also uncover challenges related to government support and market access. This book also considers the future of the sector, including the role of institutional reform, multiscale networks, and adaptive management strategies.

The purpose of social science analysis of climate change is to assist policy makers in understanding the expected flows of benefits and costs of policy options over time and to improve our understanding of the human dimensions of the climate change issue. This report deals with socioeconomic criteria for assessment and with the development of methods and approaches for obtaining a better understanding of the socioeconomic impacts and adaptive responses to climate change in Canada's forest sector. Policy makers responding to the climate change issue must deal with many complex issues and unique circumstances. These issues and circumstances also have a bearing on methodologies for undertaking analysis of the future impacts of climate change. Climate change and the effects of climate change on human society spans multiple scales, which leads to the need to consider feedback's and interactions between environmental and human systems, between political systems and between different parts or segments of economies. The implications are that dynamic general or partial equilibrium models integrated with ecosystem response models will be required in order to understand the implications of climate change for land use change, future ecosystem distributions and the supply of timber from Canada's forests. In addition to affecting future timber supply and future commercial forest areas, climate change will influence the benefits Canadians receive from non-market benefits such as outdoor recreation. Currently there is limited analysis of the effects of climate change on non-market values and this area requires more work. Another factor influencing climate change analysis is that the issue spans unusually long time frames for policy analysis and economic analysis. This raises questions about suitable discount rates and accounting for social welfare of future generations. Finally, there is significant uncertainty in long term predictions of climate change and in how the integrated human/biological system will respond over time. Decision analysis, safe minimum standards, precautionary principles and maximin criterion provide some way to incorporate uncertainty into decision making. In terms of integrated assessment models, systematic consideration for the diversity of opinions and results from scientific studies regarding future climate and ecosystems shifts is required.