Developing a Community-Based Resilience Assessment Model with reference to Northern Ghana

This paper reviews trends in the academic literature on cumulative effects assessment (CEA) of disturbance on forest ecosystems to advance research in the broader context of impact assessments. Disturbance is any distinct spatiotemporal event that disrupts the structure and composition of an ecosystem affecting resource availability. We developed a Python package to automate search term selection, write search strategies, reduce bias and improve the efficient and effective selection of articles from academic databases and grey literature. We identified 148 peer-reviewed literature published between 1986 and 2022 and conducted an inductive and deductive thematic analysis of the results. Our findings revealed that CEA studies are concentrated in the global north, with most publications from authors affiliated with government agencies in the USA and Canada. Methodological and analytical approaches are less interdisciplinary but mainly quantitative and expert-driven, involving modeling the impacts of disturbances on biophysical valued components. Furthermore, the assessment of socioeconomic valued components, including the effects of disturbance on Indigenous wellbeing connected to forests, has received less attention. Even though there is a high preference for regional assessment, challenges with data access, quality, and analysis, especially baseline data over long periods, are hampering effective CEA. Few articles examined CEA - policy/management nexus. Of the few studies, challenges such as the inadequate implementation of CEA mitigation strategies due to policy drawbacks and resource constraints, the high cost of monitoring multiple indicators, and poor connections between scenarios/modeling and management actions were paramount. Future CEA research is needed to broaden our understanding of how multiple disturbance affects forests in the global south and coupled social and ecological systems and their implications for sustainable forest management.

With its northern location, the exposure and vulnerability of Canada's forest ecosystems to climate change impacts are all too glaring. While there is now an extensive body of literature describing expected climate change impacts and potential responses, studies characterizing the implementation of adaptation and mitigation practices in forest management remain rare in the Canadian forest sector. Using a systematic literature review, we examined reports on forest management practices implemented in response to climate change, specifically focusing on governance and institutional arrangements that either support or limit climate change adaptation and mitigation responses. Our literature sample size of 24 documents suggests that the body of literature reporting on adaptation and mitigation practices in forest management is scarce. Governments remain the dominant actors providing funding and leading the implementation and reporting of climate change adaptation practices, primarily in response to national or international climate change commitments. Forest practices such as enhanced silviculture, assisted migration, and nature-based solutions were the most frequently reported. However, given the scarcity of literature, it is difficult to conclude the scope of climate change adaptation practice uptake in Canada. Barriers such as lack of information/data, inter-jurisdictional knowledge transfer, policy conflicts, forest tenure models, technical capacity gaps, and economic barriers to adaptation need to be overcome to strengthen climate change response in forest management. Better coordination of reporting at the provincial and national levels and improved information flows between private sector organizations and governments are needed.

Canada is recognized as a global leader in sustainable forest management. Canadian forests and the forest sector remain vital pillars of the Canadian economy and home to many rural and remote communities. However, climate change is an existential threat to the sustainability of forests and forest-dependent communities. While both direct and indirect threats posed by climate change to Canada's forest sector are now well understood, our understanding of specific forest practices that have emerged from the body of science to mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts is not well documented. Through a review of the scientific and grey literature, this study expands our knowledge and operational gaps associated with implementing climate change adaptation and mitigation practices in Canadian forests. The study found a dearth of literature specifically dedicated to reporting on the type of forest practices currently in use across Canada to address mitigation and adaptation. Most reports or studies were published in 2019 or later, with federal and provincial governments being the dominant actors in reporting and monitoring, research, and funding. Across the 15 terrestrial ecozones in Canada, forest practices linked to climate change were reported in 12 ecozones, with most practices reported in the Montane Cordillera located in western Canada. Common forest practices reported include fuel management, assisted migration, enhanced silvicultural activities, and carbon offset projects. We conclude that climate change adaptation/mitigation practices in Canada are in their early stages of implementation. Many practices remain in experimental stages (e.g., genetic trials) or are implemented at a relatively small scale in Canada (e.g., climate-based seed transfer and carbon reserves). The literature suggests that the most mainstream practices associated with climate change mitigation in Canada include tree planting for carbon sequestration and the designation of protected areas to enhance ecosystem resilience. We conclude that despite increasing reports linking climate change benefits with reported forest practices, the reporting in the scientific literature is scarce, poorly reported, and often not grounded in credible evidence.

Regional Risk Assessment is essential for evaluating the environmental impacts of large-scale resource development projects. However, existing Regional Asessement (RA) frameworks often lack generalizability which hinders result standardization. To address these challenges, the Risk Assessment Framework for Cumulative Effects (RAFCE) was developed to provide a standardized approach for impact identification, prioritization, and mitigation during RA. Despite these strengths, the RAFCE's reliance on spreadsheet-based manual data entry and calculations, coupled with the absence of collaborative features, increases the risks of human error and inflates operational costs including time taken to complete an RA.