The Global Forest Transition is a Human Affair

Claude A. Garcia; Sini Savilaakso; René W. Verburg; Victoria Gutierrez; Sarah Jane Wilson; Cornelia B. Krug; Marieke Sassen; Brian E. Robinson; Hannah Moersberger; Babak Naimi; Jeanine M. Rhemtulla; Hélène Dessard; Valéry Gond; Cédric Vermeulen; Franck Trolliet; Johan Oszwald; Fabien Quétier; Stephan A Pietsch; Jean-Francois Bastin; Anne Dray; Jaboury Ghazoul; Patrick O. Waeber

doi:10.20944/preprints202003.0087.v1

Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 4 March 2020 / Approved: 5 March 2020 / Online: 5 March 2020 (11:58:55 CET)

Forests across the world stand at the crossroad with climate and land use changes shaping their future. Despite the demonstration of political will and global efforts, forest loss, fragmentation and land degradation continue unabated. No clear evidence exists that these initiatives are working. Why are policies designed to halt deforestation and increase restoration of forest landscapes failing? A key reason for this apparent ineffectiveness lies in the failure to recognize the agency of the stakeholders involved and the adaptive capacities of the systems we seek to steer. Landscapes do not happen. We make them. They are the result of the sum of individual actions and decisions made by all stakeholders, and the interactions between these and biophysical processes. Likewise, forest transitions are not ecological, but social and behavioral. They are a product of the way humans manage ecosystems. Decision-makers need to integrate better representations of people’s agency in their mental models. We suggest possible solution pathways to overcome this key current barrier. These involve eliciting mental models behind policy decision, changing perspectives to better understand divergent points of view and refining strategies through explicit theories of change. Games designed to represent the constraints and opportunities that exist in the landscapes can help decision makers in these task.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202001.0339/v1: A companion paper proposing a heuristic for the theory of mind of decision makers.

Forest transition, sustainable transformation, boundary objects, games, decision-making, agency

EARTH SCIENCES, Environmental Sciences

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The Global Forest Transition is a Human Affair

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