Wallenberg grant for research on strengthening resilience in forest management

Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation award grants totaling SEK 104 million for research in the humanities and social sciences with relevance to the forest. The 13 research projects that now address forest issues from a social science and humanities research perspective complement Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation's strategic research program Wallenberg Initiatives in Forest Research, WIFORCE, which is an investment in natural forest science.

“The world is facing many major challenges that require new solutions. We often rely entirely on research in the natural sciences and technology, while social sciences and humanities are overlooked, even though they can be crucial for implementation, governance and policy development, among other things”, says Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Executive Director of Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.

She continues:
“Forest issues are multifaceted and affect many people both emotionally and economically. The forest is also an important social resource. Therefore, it is important to shed light on the issues from all scientific perspectives”.

How to strengthen resilience in forest management

Ingo Fetzer at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), Stockholm University is one of the researchers awarded funding from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Memorial Fund. He is awarded eight million SEK for the project “Resilient Innovation and Sustainable Knowledge for Swedish Forest Management in the Anthropocene” where Zahra Kalantari (KTH), Anna Tengberg (Lund University), Lan Wang-Erlandsson (SRC), and Malin Lundberg Ingemarsson (SIWI) are co-applicants.

The Swedish Forest Management Approach (SFMA) is the leading method for managing Swedish forests. However, it remains unclear how well Swedish forests are prepared for future environmental challenges. In a new project, researchers will identify critical hotspots for human-induced risks and propose policies to strengthen the resilience of SFMA managed forests in Sweden and in other countries.

The Swedish forests are crucial to Sweden’s sustainability goals and economy, but it now face new risks. In the Anthropocene – the age of humankind – changes are rapid, large-scale and interconnected that highly complex interactions create unexpected and significant uncertainties. These risks include interacting with climate extremes combined with disturbances that spreads through the forest’s networks, which creates uncertainty about the future. These complex risks affect the resilience of the Swedish forests – their capacity to cope with change, recover from disturbances, and adapt to new conditions. Among other things, the decade-long increase in forest growth in Swedish forests is now slowing down after a century of steady growth. This risks countering national goals for bioeconomy and carbon dioxide storage. The dominant Swedish management model, SFMA, is facing new challenges, and the question is whether it contributes to further loss of resilience and therefore needs to be adapted to strengthen the future resilience of forests.

The overall aim of the project is to increase knowledge about how the resilience of the SFMA-managed forests can strengthened against increasing Anthropocene risks by analyzing social networks within Swedish forestry and mapping the potential for learning and collaboration in adapting to these risks, investigating the effects and disturbances in the Swedish forest, and exploring policy scenarios to strengthen the forest resilience under uncertainty. Based on the results, the research group will develop an online tool for developing local adaptive plans for resilience that forest owners and associations can use. The tool will be developed in consultation with the Swedish Forest Agency and representatives from the forest industry. The project will combine data analysis and network methods and apply the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways method to case studies.