- A definition of what climate improved forestry is and will be, understanding that all certifications are somewhere on a spectrum. It’s okay if what’s available today isn’t perfect in every way. But let’s understand where best practices are at and where we eventually want them to go. If it’s a journey from conventional to sustainable forestry, can we chart a rough map?
One resource we could consider is the book Ecological Forest Management by Jerry Franklin, Norman Johnson and Deborah Johnson. It is recent, 2018. The difficulty is that we can’t link to its contents for obvious reasons, but we might be able get permission to use some of them. In chapter 1, “Sustaining Forests and their Benefits,” starting on pg. 6, Franklin et al. “define ecological forestry by identifying some of its principles, goals, and practices, and by contrasting it with management designed to optimize efficient production of wood fiber for economic gain, which we will label production forestry. We do not intend ‘production forestry’ to be a pejorative label; rather, we use the term to provide a contrast with management that is designed to sustain or restore multiple forest benefits.”
The authors go on to compare the conceptual foundation of these two approaches to forestry as follows:
"Ecological forestry uses ecological models from natural forest systems as the basis for managing forests. It incorporates principles of natural forest development, including the role of natural disturbances, in the initiation, development, and maintenance of forests and forest landscape mosaics. Most importantly, ecological forestry recognizes that forests are ecosystems with diverse biota, complex structure, and multiple functions, and not simply a collection of trees valuable primarily for the production of wood. In doing so it seeks to maintain the fundamental capacities (integrity) of the forest ecosystems to which it is applied.
“Production forestry utilizes agronomic and economic models as a basis for managing forests. It combines farming principles with rate of return analysis to find the amount and spatial organization of capital that will best achieve desired economic outcomes. In production forestry the forest, which is generally a plantation, is viewed as a collection of trees that are managed for the economically efficient production of wood. Consideration of other values is limited to what society requires.”
- A tool that summarizes forestry regulations/practices by state and province for North America. We prioritize local sourcing and work all over the continent - it would be so helpful to know where different regulatory bodies stand.
This appears quite doable and could be one of the solutions brought forward by our working group. It seems to me that it would be most useful for the purposes of climate smarter wood procurement if the regs were rated or ranked against some set of (relatively) objective criteria.
- I hesitate to suggest this because I don’t want to create a new qualification, but a database of foresters/forests that includes their value proposition as it relates to social equity and environmental sustainability. Where groups that aren’t (for example) certified FSC but are working to manage their forest sustainably, groups that are minority owned or run by First Nations, can be found and searched for based on their region and those unique characteristics.
This one seems hard. There are so many forestland owners. In the U.S., 36% of the forest is owned by families – more than any other ownership type – and there are more than 10 million family forest ownerships!