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Research highlights: Funding forest management with subsidies from carbon offsetters is a well-documented mechanism in tropical regions. This article provides complementary insights into the use of voluntary offset contracts in temperate forests. Background and objectives: The mitigation of greenhouse emissions has become a major global issue, leading to changes in forest management to increase the capacity of forests to store carbon. This can lead to conflicts of use with other forest ecosystem services such as timber production or biodiversity conservation. Our main goal is to describe collective actions to fund carbon-oriented forestry with subsidies from carbon offsetters and to analyze how their governance and functioning prevent conflicts pertaining to multi-functionality. Materials and methods: We assembled an interdisciplinary research team comprising two ecologists, a social scientist, and an economist. Drawing on a conceptual framework of ecosystem services, social interdependencies, and collective action, we based our qualitative analysis on semi-structured interviews from two French case studies. Results: Carbon-oriented intermediary forest organizations offer offset contracts to private firms and public bodies. Communication is geared toward the mitigation outcomes of the contracts as well as their beneficial side effects in providing the ecosystem services of interest to the offsetters. Subsidies then act as a financial lever to fund carbon-oriented forestry operations. Scientific committees and reporting methodologies serve as environmental, social, and economic safeguards. Conclusions: These new intermediary forest organizations use efficient forest operations and evaluation methodologies to improve forest carbon storage. Their main innovation lies in their collective governance rooted in regional forest social-ecological systems. Their consideration of multi-functionality and socioeconomic issues can be seen as an obstacle to rapid development, but they ensure sustainability and avoid conflicts between producers and beneficiaries of forest ecosystem services. Attention must be paid to interactions with broader spatial and temporal carbon policies.
Timothée Fouqueray; Lucile Génin; Michel Trommetter; Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste. Efficient, Sustainable, and Multifunctional Carbon Offsetting to Boost Forest Management: A Comparative Case Study. Forests 2021, 12, 386 .
AMA StyleTimothée Fouqueray, Lucile Génin, Michel Trommetter, Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste. Efficient, Sustainable, and Multifunctional Carbon Offsetting to Boost Forest Management: A Comparative Case Study. Forests. 2021; 12 (4):386.
Chicago/Turabian StyleTimothée Fouqueray; Lucile Génin; Michel Trommetter; Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste. 2021. "Efficient, Sustainable, and Multifunctional Carbon Offsetting to Boost Forest Management: A Comparative Case Study." Forests 12, no. 4: 386.
Transformability is increasingly promoted as a way of moving societies toward more sustainable futures in the era of the Anthropocene, mostly because the concept of resilience has fallen short in many instances where impacts on social-ecological systems are continuous, varied, and usually unknown. While such transformations can play a crucial role in improving the sustainability of social-ecological systems, they may lead to unexpected and undesirable outcomes. This literature review on social-ecological transformability and wicked problems seeks to shed light on and acknowledge some of the limitations of transformability regarding unforeseen conditions. We argue that wicked problems arise in transformation initiatives in the presence of high complexity, deep uncertainty, deep conflicts, and divergence among stakeholders, as well as scale mismatches concerning spatial, temporal, and institutional processes. Our findings may explain why some transformation initiatives fail to generate expected changes on the ground, mainly in two cases: (a) a polarized configuration that maintains the status quo of the system to be transformed and (b) an unforeseen transformation that causes the system to lurch from crisis to crisis. To conclude, we recommend using diagnostic questions to prevent wicked problems in social-ecological transformations.
Samia Sediri; Michel Trommetter; Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste; Juan Fernandez-Manjarrés. Transformability as a Wicked Problem: A Cautionary Tale? Sustainability 2020, 12, 5895 .
AMA StyleSamia Sediri, Michel Trommetter, Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste, Juan Fernandez-Manjarrés. Transformability as a Wicked Problem: A Cautionary Tale? Sustainability. 2020; 12 (15):5895.
Chicago/Turabian StyleSamia Sediri; Michel Trommetter; Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste; Juan Fernandez-Manjarrés. 2020. "Transformability as a Wicked Problem: A Cautionary Tale?" Sustainability 12, no. 15: 5895.