Grand challenges : forests and global change

In seeking to identify challenges for forest research, we take an over-the-horizon view. The obvious context for such a view is the current state of the world’s forests, especially in relation to their management and conservation (in the broadest sense of the word). Three contextual factors stand out: (1) Changes in area and status (as determined by legislation and policy) of native forests. (2) Population growth and urbanization (and implications for use of energy and materials and competition with food production). (3) Changes in area and productivity of industrial plantations. For the first of these, we note that in 2015, forests covered 4 billion hectares of the globe (FAO, 2016). National policies and legislation designed to protect forest values (e.g., often described as Sustainable Forest Management—SFM) covered 70% of this area in 2010 and 99% in 2015. Best practice SFM (by some definitions) is now applied to _1.1 billion hectares (see also MacDicken et al., 2015). The area under international certification schemes for SFM increased 30-fold from 14 million hectares in 2000 to 438 million hectares in 2014. Conservation of biodiversity is now the primary goal of 16% of the world’s forested lands and 27% of tropical forests (See Figure 1). Nonetheless, the world is still losing forest area—largely to clearing for food production - though at a much slower rate compared to, say, 1990–2000 (FAO, 2016). Poor tropical countries provide by far the greatest proportion of the net loss of natural forests (Sloan and Sayer, 2015).