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Cross-jurisdictional insights from forest practitioners on novel climate-adaptive options for Canada’s forests

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Abstract

Forest practitioners play a key role in the development and implementation of novel interventions to respond to climate change in forests. However, little is known about how this group perceives climate change adaptation, let alone novel interventions. Understanding how practitioners evaluate and weigh the risks of climate change for forests, their levels and patterns of support for different climate-adaptive interventions, and their views about key factors to consider in implementing novel interventions, is essential for understanding how and why different forest jurisdictions are responding to climate change. Using a comparative case study of three Canadian provinces—Alberta, British Columbia, and Québec—we use an online survey to quantify the judgments of forest practitioners (n = 531) as above. We focus on assisted migration (AM), a climate-adaptive reforestation option that involves the intentional movement of tree species to more suitable areas within or outside of natural range based on climatic projections and genomic information. Overall, we find widespread support for AM across all three provinces, with more support for AM within as compared with outside of natural range. The central challenges of implementing AM are primarily perceived to be technical (e.g., climate projections, ecological data, and modeling), with other factors (e.g., economic viability, capacity and willingness of the forest sector, public opinion) being of secondary concern. While perceptions and patterns of support vary by province, our findings suggest that forest practitioners are embracing novel reforestation practices such as AM in response to new realities brought about by climate change.

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Notes

  1. We also sought the opinions of professional biologists (e.g., ecologists, geneticists, plant biologists). However, the sample size of completed surveys by biologists was too small, and we do not present these results in this paper.

  2. We collected a total of 593 completed surveys. Those jurisdictions that fell below the 30 response threshold include 23 in Ontario, 21 in New Brunswick, 6 in Newfoundland and Labrador, 5 in Nova Scotia, 4 in Saskatchewan, 2 in Manitoba, and 1 in Yukon.

  3. Given that the focus of our survey was on climate-adaptive forest strategies, we acknowledge that the proportion of respondents who cited climate change adaptation as one of the most important reforestation outcomes may be overstated and that this result should be approached with caution.

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Funding

This study was financially supported by funding from Genome Canada (CoAdapTree project no. 241 REF).

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  1. Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, 2027-2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent, Robert Kozak & Shannon Hagerman

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  1. Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent
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  2. Robert Kozak
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  3. Shannon Hagerman
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Correspondence to Guillaume Peterson St-Laurent.

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Communicated by Debbie Ley

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Peterson St-Laurent, G., Kozak, R. & Hagerman, S. Cross-jurisdictional insights from forest practitioners on novel climate-adaptive options for Canada’s forests. Reg Environ Change 21, 4 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01733-3

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