Browsing by Subject "private forest owners"

Forests play a key role in climate change mitigation. There are different ways in which forests can contribute to both increasing carbon sequestration and reducing emissions. In Finland, forests are largely owned by private forest owners and thus the actions of these forest owners have a great impact on the climate change mitigation potential of forests. Thereby, this study examined the perceptions of Finnish forest owners on the following climate change mitigation strategies in the forest sector: Forest management, More harvest, Less harvest, Wood products, Conservation, Adaptation, and Land use change. Especially, the study focused on “Less intervention” (a combination of three individual strategies), and “Forest management” as strategies and tested how the following hypothesized aspects are associated with the support for these strategies: the prioritized values affecting the choice between climate change mitigation strategies in the forest sector, risk perception of climate change, political orientation, education level, and the size of forest land. The tested hypotheses were derived from the existing literature on theories and empirical findings on the perceptions of citizens and forest owners. The effect of the independent variables on the chosen climate change mitigation strategies was studied through linear regression analysis based on a quantitative survey with 892 responses. Regression models were established separately for both chosen strategies. On average, forest owners supported all climate change mitigation strategies in the forest sector, except Less harvest. Further the results of the linear regression analysis supported all hypotheses to some degree. Perceived risk of climate change emerged as an important measure affecting the support for climate change mitigation strategies in general. Left-right political orientation was found important, where individuals positioned more on the right side of the political spectrum generally supported strategies that have more human intervention in forests. Forest owners’ prioritized values were discovered to significantly affect the support for climate change mitigation strategies in the forest sector, and forest owners who valued biodiversity gave more support towards Less intervention and less support towards Forest management. Forest owners with a smaller property tended to be slightly more supportive towards Less intervention, but in the Forest management model, the effect was not significant. Similarly, the simultaneous effect of education and political orientation was significant in the Less intervention model, indicating that forest owners with a university degree and right-winged political orientation tended to be more supportive towards strategies with more human intervention in forests, compared to forest owners with a university degree and left-winged political orientation. Apart from hypothesized variables, gender was found a significant predictor of support towards strategies, where, on average, women were more likely to support Less intervention, and similarly be more opposing towards Forest management, compared to men. In light of the results, Finnish forest owners tend to be rather conscious about climate change and support on average different climate change mitigation strategies in the forest sector. Nevertheless, private forest owners are a heterogeneous group of people whose preferences vary greatly, and thus policies need to be implemented accordingly.

Forests are highly valued for the wide range of ecosystem services they provide and are increasingly expected to play a role in providing solutions to both rural development and global challenges. In countries where forest ownership structure is characterized by a high share of private ownership, non-industrial, private forest owners eventually determine the type and extent of management of a large part of national forest resources. In Italy, where this is the case, the potential of forests remains largely unexploited, and the alleged lack of active management even threatens to increase forest vulnerability. In this context, the new Italian Forest Strategy aims to untap the forests’ potential and enhance the delivery of their services by promoting an active, sustainable management, but is faced with the challenge of reviving the interest of private owners in managing their land. Despite being implicitly entrusted with the responsibility of stewardship of forest resources, the Italian forest owner is still a mysterious figure, due to data scarcity, and is mostly absent from the political and economic scene. Characterizing forest owners, understanding their values, objectives, and other factors affecting their behavior is crucial to develop appropriate and effective policy instruments that will sensitize and incentivize them to “own” their land in the way that society would expect of them. This work contributes to filling the data gap on Italian forest owners by presenting a case study from a region of the western Alps, the Autonomous Region of Aosta Valley. By the way of a structured questionnaire and in-depth semi-structured interviews, we investigated how forest owners perceived forest management and the role they played, could play, or would be willing to play in forest stewardship. The results show that forest owners unanimously believe that forests need to be managed, a term which they mostly associate to maintenance, intended as taking care of the forests in order to keep it healthy and prosperous. However, they still hold a rather traditional view of forest uses, in which social and societal functions of forests are rarely addressed or related to owner’s responsibility. Also, they do not perceive the forest as economically valuable, and the current lack of economic sustainability of forest operations is driving forest abandonment, which indicates that economic factors are a driving force for stewardship decisions. Five stewardship types, ranging on a gradient of low to high stewardship behavior, characterize the Aosta Valley forest owners: the oblivious and self-willed stewards (types that emerged from participants’ narratives), and the wishful, dutiful, and committed steward types (types represented by the participants). The wishful and dutiful types offer two targets of interest for policy intervention: the first is longing for a greater role in forest stewardship but needs guidance to act, and the second, whose stewardship behavior is driven by their moral norms towards their heritage, could be motivated to extend their existing range of action or diversify the ecosystem services they foster. Overall, we found that forest owners displayed willingness to increase their stewardship behavior but lacked the capacity to take on this responsibility alone in the current context. Raising stewardship levels will require regional forest authorities to engage more deeply with private owners and their forests, as well as strong supporting policies that should not neglect financial incentives in the difficult context of mountain forestry but should also aim to revalorize the forests and forest sectors, including the non-wood sector, which can help tackling the challenge of ensuring the societal outcomes of forest stewardship.