Mountain forests are an example of an ecosystem oriented at performance of diverse ecosystems services, while being an essential constituent of mountainous areas. The mountain forests of Ukraine, being a part of the Eastern European mid-latitude ecotone, represent a resource-rich forest management hotspot. Given the low energy efficiency and growing national energy demands driven by the need for accelerated economic development, forests gain importance for timber production, but equally as a renewable energy source. To sustainably adjust forest management to changing needs and markets, a reliable data on wood energy potentials and their distribution within the region is required. However, the ecosystem services aimed at securing environmental and social aspects are equally important.

The presented research is aimed at quantitative biophysical, environmental, and economic assessment of energy potential of woody biomass in forests located in Carpathian and Crimean mountainous systems on the territory of Ukraine. Within the research, it is foreseen to carry out a set of extra activities that add value to the scientific product: developing the baseline dataset; procedures for embedding the proposed algorithms to the existing forest management planning system; elaborating approaches and methodologies for forecasting the dynamics of the energy potential under environmental changes.

We incorporate an original methodological approach aimed at balancing the sphere of primary interest (biomass energy potential) with those of diverse environmental, economic, and social constraints that exist in the research region. The research is currently supported by the state and is a constituent of international collaboration activities between Ukraine and Switzerland. The results can be of benefit for national decision- and policy-making processes in the frame of the provisions of low-carbon and circular economies, and risk-resilient forest management. The outcomes and scientific products have a potential for implementation in forest management planning and the emerging Ukraine’s National Forest Inventory.

Fort McPherson, an artic Indigenous community in the Northwest Territories, has been exploring using wood-based bioenergy to replace their diesel generated power system, but the greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential is uncertain. We estimated the potential GHG emission reductions and the timing of GHG benefits when utilizing 1) wood chips made from locally harvested willow shrubs or 2) imported wood pellets made from sawmill residues. GHG benefits can be achieved within 0-36 years for local wood chips, but takes 68-100+ years for imported pellets. Increases in transport distance resulted in delays in GHG emissions benefits by 0 to 10 years for local willow chips and by 41 to 100 years for imported sawmill pellets. Decreasing biomass boiler efficiency from 90% to 65% led to an increase in carbon parity times by 27 to 36 years for local chips and by 62 to 121 years for imported pellets. A decrease in harvest age of local willow from 40 to 24 years reduced the time to GHG benefits by 0 to 9 years. This study shows that the use of forest biomass to replace diesel in remote northern communities’ energy systems can generate GHG savings within a time-frame that is relevant to current climate change concerns.

For Russia, the potential of forest use is hard to overestimate. Russia possesses the world’s largest forest reserves and is one of the major exporters in the world timber market. Besides, Russian boreal forests play a crucial role in maintaining the global climate balance. This research explores the role of Russian forest products on the global market, via measuring competitiveness both at national and regional levels. The competitiveness level of timber commodities was measured with three indicators of revealed comparative advantages. Analysis covered 153 countries and 81 Russian regions. In contrast to previous studies, which commonly used three aggregated commodity groups by the processing level, this research has considered all forest products in separate five groups. This approach allowed to clearly see the differences in the level of development of the wood and paper sectors for the countries under study.

Results show that the main specialization in trade for Russia is raw wood and semi-finished wood and paper products. The most competitive Russian products on the global timber market are wood in the rough, simply worked wood, fuel wood, wood in chips or particles, veneers and plywood, different wood manufactures. There is a big difference between northwestern regions of Russia with diversified trade on the EU market, and the Siberia and the Far East, depending on the demand for raw timber from Asian markets. Another piece of evidence of regional heterogeneity in Russia can be seen in the differences in trade patterns between the wood and paper sectors. Only 27% of all regions obtain comparative advantages in finished paper products trade, while 61% demonstrated an advantage in trade in finished wood products.

Despite the growing discussion of the problems of the economy of climate change, there is a lack of empirical research on the possible effects of global warming on natural resource management. This problem is especially important for Russia, rich in natural and land resources but showing significant research gap in related fields. In this article, the author focuses on the effects of a gradually changing climate on the logging volume, taking into account the spatial differentiation of the Russian regions. The statistics of logging in the regions of Russia (RSFSR) and the corresponding meteorological information are both available for the period since 1946. The analysis of causality relies on the well-known Granger test with Toda – Yamamoto procedure. As the research findings show, the global trends of gradual increase in air temperature in the regions concerned coincide with the global trends. However, despite this fact, there is no reason to consider this effect as the reason for the increase in the logging volume in the observed period. Similar results were obtained for precipitation. Two facts can explain this conclusion: a) in the study period there was a significant growth in the total volume of logging, which was determined by high rates of growth of the entire Soviet economy but was not limited to the state of the resource base of the industry; b) the beginning of temperature changes had to be about the middle of the period and did not have time to have a significant impact on the state of the resource base of the industry. The state of the resource base of logging in Siberian regions is not a limiting factor for the forest sector. This circumstance can be explained, apparently, by the still high surplus of forest resources in relation to the real needs of the market. The research was funded by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 19-18-00145).

Context: Expectations of what forests and woodlands should provide vary in time and space, and among stakeholder groups with different value systems. This stresses the importance of understanding the role of cultural legacies and dynamics regarding societal structures.

Aim: Implementing sustainable forest management policy requires a landscape perspective in terms of material and immaterial dimensions (ecological, social, economic), and spatial extent beyond stands and forest management units. This study explores the consequences of choosing different vantage points for analyses of barriers and bridges to adaptation.

Methods: Using a narrative approach, three groups of vantage points are reviewed: (1) biodiversity as short-hand for composition, structure and function of ecosystems at multiple scales, which support human well-being; (2) levels of stakeholder interactions, and (3) economic hierarchies and currencies. Being a success story in terms of sustained yield wood production Sweden is used as a case study.

Results: Sustained yield wood production and biodiversity conservation encompass different portfolios of ecosystem aspects and spatio-temporal scales, and ignorance of these differences can not resolve their mutual rivalry. A review of six groups of agents in the traditional industrial forest value chain highlights inequalities in terms of distribution of power across different levels of governance. This effectively marginalises other than powerful industrial actors. Uneven distribution of financial results along the value chain creates winners and losers, and not all benefits of forest ecosystems can be measured using monetary valuation. There are also other currencies and incentives.

Conclusions: History repeats itself. Therefore longitudinal comparative studies of countries and regions can help foster holistic multi-dimensional and multi-level systems thinking. With Thomas Piketty’s words, this calls for the strong need “to enable citizens to reclaim possession of economic and historical knowledge”. A key challenges to handle the decay of truth, i.e. the diminishing role of facts, data, and analysis in political and civic discourses, which has been fuelled by new and rapidly evolving digital arenas.

Forests are subject to various social, economic and ecological demands. In most EU countries several national policies aim to guide forest use, but often with competing objectives leading to incompatible management paradigms. The incoherence among policy goals and fragmented coordination in their implementation may negatively impact the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem services (FES). We used a multi-objective forest planning approach at the national scale to assess the optimal management that corresponds with the objectives of different Finnish sectoral policies and analysed their long-term effects on FES provisioning. We 1) translated the written sectoral policy documents (national forest strategy (NFS), biodiversity conservation strategy (BCS), and bioeconomy strategy (BES)) into optimisation scenarios including quantitative demands for FES; 2) simulated a systematic sample of forest stands representing the whole country with alternative management regimes and under climate change; and 3) determined the combinations of management regimes matching best with each policy optimisation scenario.

The NFS proved to be the most comprehensive policy with the highest number of targeted FES, while BES had the fewest stated FES targets. However, NFS is oriented towards the value chains of wood and bioenergy with a dominating economic growth paradigm, which caused intense within-policy conflicts and hindered reaching the biodiversity targets. The BCS and BES targets were on opposite more coherent, but policies showed either sustainability gaps in terms of timber and bioenergy potentials (BCS) or no improvements in forest biodiversity conservation (BES). All scenarios resulted in segregated forest management practices dominated by continuous cover forestry, protected areas, and intensive management zones, with actual proportions depending on the policy focus. Our results highlight for the first time the conflicts among Finnish sectoral forest policies in terms of management requirements and policy effects on forest multifunctionality, and provide valuable input for policymakers to increase coherence among future policies.

We examine how an albedo-adjusted carbon rent policy would affect the management and utilization of Finnish forests. The analysis is conducted using FinFEP, which is a partial equilibrium model of the Finnish Forest and Energy Sectors. We compare our results to a baseline scenario (without climate policy) and carbon rent scenario (without an albedo-adjustment). An albedo-adjusted policy based on a 15 € tCO2-1 carbon price increases carbon storage and the albedo-induced forcing of Finnish forests, but less than a plain carbon rent policy. The albedo-adjusted policy reduces harvests compared to the baseline, but less than the plain policy. Due to a the relatively large population share of Hartmanian forest owners, harvests remain below the baseline even in the long run despite the increased timber reserve. Unlike the plain policy, the albedo-adjusted policy does not emphasize the role of thinning in the short run. The plain policy postpones the final felling of stands and increases thinning in the meanwhile. The albedo-adjusted policy postpones the final felling of stands less than the plain policy and decreases thinning in the meanwhile. The same trend is observed for all three species. The difference between the harvesting patterns observed under the albedo-adjusted and the plain carbon rent policy are greater in Northern than in Southern Finland.