- ➔ Innovation is a key enabler of progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It is also an important accelerator for achieving the three Global Goals of FAO Members and enhancing the potential of forests and trees to address global challenges. A vast range of innovations is already having profound influences on the forest sector.
- ➔ Five types of innovation are enhancing the potential of forests and trees to address global challenges:
- ➔ Four factors form barriers to scaling up innovation: (1) lack of innovation culture; (2) risk; (3) potential limitations in various forms of capital; and (4) unsupportive policies and regulations. An organizational culture that recognizes and embraces the transformative potential of innovation can help de-risk innovation processes and empower stakeholders to respond to current and future challenges.
- ➔ Innovation can create winners and losers, and inclusive and gender-responsive approaches are needed to avoid harm and ensure the fair distribution of benefits among men, women and youth in all socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Efforts to promote innovation must consider and integrate the local circumstances, perspectives, knowledge, needs and rights of all stakeholders.
▪ (1) technological (in three subtypes of digital, product/process and biotechnological). For example, open access to remote-sensing data and the facilitated use of cloud computing are enabling digital methodologies that generate high-quality forest data and improve forest management processes;
▪ (2) social, (3) policy and (4) institutional – such as new efforts to better engage women, youth and Indigenous Peoples in developing locally led solutions, the promotion of multistakeholder partnerships and cross-sectoral approaches in land-use policies and planning, and support for cooperatives to increase the bargaining power of smallholders; and
▪ (5) financial – such as innovations in public- and private-sector finance to enhance the value of standing forests, boost restoration efforts, and increase access to loans for smallholders for sustainable production.
Combinations (“bundles”) of these innovation types can unleash powerful forces for change.
3.1 Innovation is a key enabler of progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals
Science, technology and innovation are at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and appear in numerous targets in the SDGs. Science and technology have been identified as levers for accelerating progress towards the SDGs while minimizing trade-offs.67
Innovation is an important accelerator for agrifood systems transformation and for achieving the three Global Goals of FAO Membersr in support of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs by increasing productivity, quality, diversity, efficiency and economic, social and environmental sustainability. In line with the FAO Science and Innovation Strategy,9 innovation is defined here as “doing something new and different whether solving an old problem in a new way, addressing a new problem with a proven solution, or bringing a new solution to a new problem.”
FAO identifies five types of innovation: technological, social, policy, institutional and financial (Table 3). Such a typology is useful for describing the overarching suite of innovations that can be used, depending on objectives and the context in which the innovation is being applied. The typology is used in this document to organize the diverse innovations arising in the forest sector.
TABLE 3The FAO innovation typology
SOURCES: FAO. 2022. Science and Innovation Strategy. Rome; FAO. 2023a. Technology. Science, Technology and Innovation. In: FAO. Rome. [Cited 9 October 2023]. https://www.fao.org/science-technology-and-innovation/technology/en; FAO. 2023b. Innovation. Science, Technology and Innovation. In: FAO. [Cited 9 October 2023]. https://www.fao.org/science-technology-and-innovation/innovation/en; and Damanpour, F. & Gopalakrishnan, S. 2001. The dynamics of the adoption of product and process innovations in organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 38(1): 45–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00227
Innovations often occur in bundles of innovation types because a web of actors and actions – an innovation “ecosystem” (Box 5) – must align to enable the development and adoption of innovations. For example, advances in open-access remote sensing and increased access to powerful cloud-computing resources (technological innovation) have enabled improved national capacities for the sound measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. This, in turn, has enabled the development of results-based payments associated with the REDD+ frameworks under the Paris Agreement on climate change and the growth of forest carbon markets, with a focus on the importance of safeguards (policy, institutional, financial and social). In the building industry, the adoption of mass timber as an innovation has gained momentum, due in part to factors such as updates to building codes, the possibility and availability of computer-numerically controlled machining, a desire to reduce the carbon intensity of the built environment, and new mechanisms for developing sustainable building models.
Box 5Innovation ecosystems
Innovation is determined by numerous and complex interactions between actors and artifacts (such as products, services and technological tools) within an innovation “ecosystem”, which can be defined as “the evolving set of actors, activities, and artifacts, and the institutions and relations, including complementary and substitute relations, that are important for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors.”68 A well-functioning innovation ecosystem provides the general economic and institutional environment required for innovation to happen.69 The innovation ecosystem itself is shaped by a range of economic, social, environmental and other factors that affect the operating environment in which an innovation occurs. Within an innovation ecosystem, diverse actors interact with each other and with artifacts and other resources in complex ways that ultimately trigger innovation creation or provide the enabling conditions in which an innovation can be adopted.68
Interactions among actors and artifacts are varied and complex: for example, they could include agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture stakeholders engaging in mutual learning and information exchange to develop integrated approaches for landscape management, or a manufacturing firm embracing new online marketing services that trigger the development of a new wood-based product. Different actors will be motivated by different values and potential outcomes, which themselves can be multifaceted and complex. For example, the private sector may be motivated primarily by profit, but achieving profit may require participation in activities to maintain social licence to operate, which in turn might deliver public goods. Conversely, although the public sector might be driven by the need to deliver public goods, this could require the involvement of the private sector, leading to the development of enabling policies to ensure that private-sector profits can be maintained while also delivering desired public goods.
Because such interactions take place within dynamic systems, they are unpredictable and may yield unintended results. The trajectory and development of innovations is rarely linear; it typically involves complex chains of events and feedback loops in which new ideas are refined and adapted.70 The creation of innovations can also have broader cumulative or disruptive impacts that ultimately reshape the nature of the operating environment.
Some innovation types are complementary and sequentially necessary – for example, a new policy might require institutional changes in organizations for effective implementation, which, in turn, might require changes in social behaviours and norms. Different types may also have different scales of impact: for example, a social innovation may start at the grassroots level but lead to provincial or national demands for policy change, which may drive wider institutional innovation. Innovation takes time, and different kinds of innovation evolve at different speeds. Policy innovations are enhanced by supportive organizational frameworks and rules. Policy and institutional innovations are more likely to succeed when they overlap and are supported by broader social values and norms.
This chapter provides an overview of innovations in the forest sector, organized according to the FAO typology, with illustrative examples and references to case studies presented in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 enumerates five enabling actions that, if taken, would help unleash the power of innovation to maximize the contributions of forests to addressing global challenges.
