Finding the path in the forest – Together towards multifunctional forests in southern Sweden – ForestPath

Recent focus on climate mitigation has highlighted the difficulties of achieving multiple goals in forests.

In southern Sweden, with its mostly privately owned productive forests, high biodiversity values and demands from a growing population, goal conflicts are unavoidable. However, the extent of conflicts depends on the choice of management strategy.

Finding strategies that promote multiple goals and are acceptable for owners and other interest groups is a necessary step towards multifunctionality.

To this end, we have gathered a team representing four key disciplines - ecology, forest management, law and environmental psychology and outlined a project with strong stakeholder involvement.

Our aim is to identify management strategies balancing and alleviating trade-offs between forest production, biodiversity, climate mitigation and people’s well-being.

To this end, we will develop credible biodiversity models and link them to the decision support system Heureka for analysis of trade-offs between production, biodiversity and climate mitigation. Results will form the basis for analysing impacts on perceived cultural forest ecosystem services. We will identify and evaluate the potential to implement policy instruments supporting management across scales.

Proposed solutions will be evaluated with stakeholders.

Major outputs are a review of current knowledge in the field the first year, and a synthesis on the path to multifunctional forest in south Sweden.