Forests contain a lot more than just carbon when it comes to their economic importance. And then there’s the social, environmental and cultural importance of forests too.

International concerns about forests and climate change have primarily focused on how to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation or improve carbon sequestration through reforestation.

These basically constitute the mitigation approach which tends to address the forests and climate change debate from the perspective of how forests affect climate.

An equally important but less prominently discussed approach is adaptation, which looks at the debate from the reverse perspective – how climate change impacts on forests and how to cope with change.

This is not to suggest that the two perspectives are mutually exclusive.

According to CIFOR’s Manuel Guariguata, co-author of a recent paper entitled Mitigation needs adaptation: Tropical forestry and climate change, more attention must be focused on the policies and technologies that will help forest ecosystems adapt to climate change so they can maintain their productive potential.

“Mitigating the way forest related carbon emissions and storage affect the climate is absolutely critical. But let’s not forget that forests contain a lot more than just carbon when it comes to their economic importance. And then there’s the social, environmental and cultural importance of forests too,” Guariguata says.

But the long-term survival of many tropical forests is now threatened, as they struggle to adapt to unstable temperatures and rainfall, and an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Add to this the effects of human-caused forest fires, fragmentation, and overexploitation of timber, and the capacity of forests to sustain the delivery of goods and services may be severely compromised.

“We believe that that tropical foresters, forest managers, and forest-dependent communities don’t appear to appreciate the risks posed by climate change,” Guariguata says. “And If they do, there is little practical guidance, either published or else properly disseminated, as to how to maintain the adaptive capacity of tropical forests to climate change, especially from a production standpoint”.

According to the report, many governments are focused on more readily apparent threats to their forests, for example, illegal logging or deforestation resulting from the agricultural or population expansion.

Some small but useful steps towards solving this problem are suggested in the report. These recommendations include the use of reduced impact logging (RIL).

Ensuring greater genetic diversity among seedlings for replanting activities, optimizing the size of planted juvenile tree populations, and offering financial incentives to encourage the uptake of adaptation measures.

While Guariguata and his colleagues believe that a lot of these recommendations are quite feasible, they are not overly optimistic about how likely or how soon they will be implemented by governments.

“I don’t think I or my colleagues kid ourselves that all the adaptation measures needed are going to be implemented overnight. A more realistic first step is getting forests and climate change adaptation included in national development and planning programs. The next step is to ensure that forest managers and policy makers are aware that some forestry practices may need re-assessment.”

Full report: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/
articles/AGuariguata0801.pdf