SRA-E 2018

Climate change is increasingly impacting ecosystems worldwide, shifting species distributions and increasing the frequency and severity of natural disturbances. In the forest sector - economically vital to the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada - climate-adaptive practices can address the risk that trees planted today will be mismatched with future local climates. Ongoing advances in genetics are enabling forward-looking and genomically informed reforestation programs that assist with the migration of trees to better match predicted future climates and to better withstand changes in pest and pathogen regimes. This study seeks to understand stakeholder perceptions of risk and uncertainty in climate-adaptive forest management practices, broadly, and genomically informed reforestation, in particular, distinguishing values-based concerns from those that are knowledge-based. Such perceptions of risk and uncertainty around reforestation strategies like assisted gene flow (within species range) and assisted migration (beyond species range) are largely unknown. Anticipating and, where possible, alleviating sources of hesitation and concern for climate-adaptive forestry practices will allow for their more effective and timely implementation. This study evaluates perceptions of climate-adaptive forestry practices in BC through structured focus groups. Sessions were conducted with individuals from four groups (local businesses, local government, environmental NGOs, and forestry professionals) in each of four municipalities in different ecological zones. In this talk, we present the major sources of perceived risks and benefits from assisted gene flow and assisted migration, the relationship between perceived risks and critical uncertainties, the malleability of such perceptions during group deliberation, and an assessment of those that are values-based rather than knowledge-based. We contextualize this with the forest values that participants identified as being most important, and the non-climatic risks that threaten those broader values. By clearly distinguishing concerns that are values-based from those that are knowledge-based, policy-makers can better understand how specific concerns about climate-adaptive forestry are more or less resolvable. For instance, concerns about human intervention in natural landscapes may become less acute when status quo levels of intervention are explicitly recognized.