Solving conflicts among conservation, economic and social objectives in boreal production forest landscapes

Keynote for the IUFRO Landscape Ecology Conference “Sustaining ecosystem services in forest landscapes”, 23-30 August 2015, Tartu, Estonia

Reconciling biodiversity conservation with increasing demand of natural resources and human well-being from ecosystems requires that ecological, economic and social values of the landscape are taken into account in decision-making. Joint production of economic and social values together with maintaining biodiversity is a challenging planning problem because of potential conflicts among the objectives. Using landscape level data on 30000 stands simulated over 50 years with seven alternative management options I will first demonstrate conflicts among timber production, other ecosystem services and maintaining biodiversity. I show that the conflicts among objectives are typically complex and asymmetric, and particularly timber production is in strong conflict with other objectives. Then, I apply multi-objective optimization tools to resolve the conflicts. In many cases, with careful and informed forest management planning at landscape level it is possible to achieve compromise solutions that incur minimal losses in the objectives. However, achieving these efficient plans requires a diverse combination of management options. I conclude that the current emphasis on management that aims at maximizing timber production causes considerable social and ecological costs.