Using scenarios for forest adaptation to climate change: a foresight study of the Landes de Gascogne Forest 2050

[Departement_IRSTEA]Territoires [TR1_IRSTEA]DTAM [Axe_IRSTEA]DTAM-QT2-ADAPTATION

International audience

Inglés. To ensure that forest ecosystem services will be maintained in future climate conditions, the challenge of developing and implementing forest adaptation strategies has become a priority shared across Europe (European Commission 2010) and around the world (FAO 2012). A critical aspect of any adaptation (and mitigation) strategy is to ensure that management choices have sufficient flexibility and are consistent with sustainable forest management (SFM) principles that balance the forest’s social, ecological and economic outputs. Most current studies, however, still tend to consider forest adaptation independently of exogenous developments (Seppälä et al. 2009), or are based on forecasting and thus only extrapolate from current trends. Yet the futures of forest systems are also uncertain because change may come mainly from socio-economic, and not ecological, drivers (Schoene and Bernier 2012). Climate change will, moreover, have a highly uncertain effect on socio-ecological systems such as forests. A number of authors and international publications on the environment have posited that scenarios studies offer a framework for dealing with strong uncertainties and the complexity of socio-ecological systems: “Comparisons among a set of contrasting scenarios are used to understand the systemic interrelation and dynamics of complex socio-ecological systems and to define a range of possibilities and uncertainties in quantitative and qualitative terms” (Thompson et al. 2012). Likewise, SFM practices are beginning to underscore the importance of taking into account landscape-level views of the forest, and of the many exogenous drivers of regional change, when thinking about integrated land use (Schoene and Bernier 2012). Adaptation strategies must therefore move away from single technical solutions and must not rely on one-size-fits-all mechanisms. New modes of governance that enable rapidly accelerating social, economic and institutional changes are required (Seppälä et al. 2009). Recent emphasis has also been placed on the importance of implementing regionally based forest adaptation strategies that are accepted by local stakeholders (Spathelf et al. 2013). A scenario planning approach that engages stakeholders in scenario development could be a way to overcome such challenges by combining anticipatory learning of climate change impacts (Tschakert and Dietrich 2010) with land use planning. Thus, forest adaptation could be seen from a perspective of forest planning rather than of forest management. It could involve a more indirect form of management that is broader in scale in terms of time, space and organisational level (Mermet and Farcy 2011).The objective of this paper is to discuss how a foresight approach and scenario planning can offer an appropriate framework for dealing with climate change uncertainties at local level, and for elaborating a plurality of forest adaptation strategies derived from plausible sectoral, socio-ecological and regional changes. To test this assumption, the Landes de Gascogne Forest (LGF) 2050 case study (Mora et al. 2012) appears particularly interesting, due both to recent storm damage in 1999 and 2009 and because of the increasing, diverse demands in changing economic and social conditions for various forest ecosystem goods and services. The Landes region of south-western France is located at the intersection of Northern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. It covers a surface area of about 15,000 km2. The major biophysical features of the area include temperate, oceanic climate conditions, podzolic sandy soils and shallow groundwater levels. The LGF, which was expanded in the nineteenth century to become the largest cultivated and privately owned (92 %) forest in Europe, is primarily composed of maritime pine (Pinus pinaster). The LGF covers two thirds of the Landes de Gascogne region, with agricultural and built-up land representing 18 and 7 %, respectively (Mora et al. 2012). The forest also has a significant economic impact through its forestry and forest-based industries. A unique aspect of the Landes forest-wood chain is the location of both timber processing stages within the region and its largely exclusive use of local maritime pine wood resources. However, the forestry and forest-based sector have faced difficulties since the Martin and Klaus storms in 1999 and 2009 that created approximately 70 million cubic metres of windthrow damage. The forestry sector is also experiencing structural challenges as synergies among industry subsectors weaken and biorefinery activities gain prominence. Bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the large urban centres of Bordeaux to the north and Bayonne to the south (Fig. 1), the Landes area has become an increasingly popular place to live and to work. Almost all of the 390 municipalities in the region are now experiencing population growth, urbanisation, the emergence of a broader base of economic activity and, more generally, a diversification of their forest-derived goods and services. The contribution of forest-related activities to the rural economy and to social well-being may change as a result of these trends (Slee et al. 2004).