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ArticleStrategic foresight in forestry: How Canada and the United States use a neglected tool to build a green, healthy and resilient future
XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.Strategic foresight is a tool for understanding the ways in which the future might unfold. It is a valuable tool for identifying and mitigating areas of risk while identifying opportunities for our forests, particularly in an age of uncertainty and accelerating change. In recent years, foresight has increasingly been adopted by governments, large organizations, and forward-looking business enterprises as a method to reduce risk for their operations. But forestry agencies have been relatively slow to adopt strategic foresight methods and perspectives. A key principle of foresight is the idea of multiple alternative futures. Rather than predicting exactly how the future is likely to unfold, foresight analysts identify several plausible futures. Foresight is a guide to identify potentially influential decisions, ideas, opportunities and threats. Both the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) and the United States Forest Service (USFS) are developing strategic foresight programs to help plan and operate in an environment of growing complexity, uncertainty and rapid change. The USFS has engaged in foresight in the agency’s R&D branch since 2010. The CFS’s foresight team provides advice to policymakers from within its strategic policy division and it builds capacity for forward thinking within the organization. The two organizations have recently partnered to share their findings and approaches. To that end, this paper shows how strategic foresight can help planners, managers, and policy makers understand the future of global forests, using insights from our respective agencies. We outline what foresight is, the suite of foresight tools and how they support proactive analysis and decision making, foresight’s usefulness for the forest sector, how it is practiced in North America, and how it may be beneficial for forestry globally. Keywords: Policies, knowledge management, innovation, research, partnerships ID: 3487592 -
ArticleRx for hot cities: Building climate resilience through urban greening and cooling in Los Angeles, California, USA
XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.Extreme heat and its health impacts are on the rise. Globally, the six warmest years on record all occurred since 2015, and in Los Angeles (LA) average temperatures are expected to increase up to 4.5°C in coming decades. Extreme heat causes more deaths in the United States than all other weather-related causes combined, with heat risk being most pronounced in urban areas due to the heat-island effect. Reducing urban heat exposure is an equity issue, as low-income communities and communities of color are more likely to live in neighborhoods with older buildings, low tree canopy cover, more heat-retaining surfaces, and limited access to coping strategies such as air conditioning. The Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative (LAUCC) is a multi-disciplinary partnership of researchers and expert practitioners working with communities and government to understand and mitigate heat in LA. LAUCC completed a modeling study of current and projected heat in LA County to: 1) identify geographic areas with highest vulnerability to heat-related death; 2) quantify how various urban forest cover (UFC) and built environment albedo scenarios would affect heat-related mortality, temperature, humidity, and oppressive air masses that lead to elevated mortality; and 3) quantify the number of years that climate change-induced warming could be delayed by implementing these interventions. We find that increasing shade, evaporative cooling, and albedo through increases in UFC and reflective surfaces could save one in four lives lost to heat waves in Los Angeles, mostly in low-income communities and communities of color. We also find that these measures could modify local meteorology sufficiently to delay local effects of global climate change-induced warming by 25 to 60 years under business-as-usual and moderate mitigation scenarios, respectively. These strategies can be adapted to combat extreme heat in other regions that are experiencing similar challenges. Keywords: Human health and well-being, Research, Sustainable forest management, Adaptive and integrated management, Climate change ID: 3479653 -
ArticleEcohydrology-based management as a tool for preventing wildfires in the Mediterranean urban interface area
XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.The adaptation to climate change of forest areas with intense anthropic pressure requires innovative management models characterized by an increasingly efficient use of available resources. In Mediterranean areas, the most intense and persistent droughts alter the water relations in the soil-plant-atmosphere (SPA) continuum and therefore the flammability of the vegetation and the risk of wildfires. The main aim of this work is to present the potential of using detailed information characterizing the SPA for estimating key variables used for forest fire prevention. To this end, physiological, ecohydrological and meteorological measurements (water potential, soil/plant water content, sap flow, etc.) are carried out to model the response of live fuel moisture content (LFMC) to environmental conditions in representative Aleppo pine plots located in a forested area close to Valencia city (Spain). In addition, spectral indexes estimated from Sentinel bands (NDVI, EVI, NDMI, MSI, RGR, BSI and NDWI) are also tested for obtaining the spatio-temporal dynamics of LFMC at the forestscale. The results show the importance of assessing LFMC along the entire hydrological year due to its variation with phenology: minimum values are obtained at the beginning of spring (81.3%, 64mm of soil water content in the profile and 0.2Kpa of VPD) vs. 90.1% during the driest environmental (summer) conditions (18mm of soil water content and 1.9Kpa of VPD). Combining physiological and environmental predictors provides good estimations of LFMC (R 2 >0.70-0.84 in several cases). In addition, RGR, BSI and NDWI indexes are found to be promising predictors of LFMC (R2= 0.7). Efforts such as the one presented here to link a detailed SPA characterization with fire prevention are innovative and emerging, but also necessary when realistic estimations of LFMC dynamics are required. Particularly, our results will serve to improve the forest management of Mediterranean forests, allowing for the precise prediction and identification of forest wildfire behavior and risk thresholds (from surface fire to crown fire), but also the design of optimum irrigation schemes to decrease the risk of crown fires as those with the highest negative impacts. Keywords: live fuel moisture content; ecohydrology; fire weather index; wildland-urban interface; sapflow ID: 3623757
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