Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Conghe Song, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

; Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza, Duke University

Description:

Forests provide vital natural resources and ecosystem services to the society as public goods, such as carbon storage to mitigate global warming and quality habitat to preserve biodiversity. Forests also serve as essential safety net for many poor and vulnerable people. Currently, one quarter of the world population are estimated to live within or in proximity to forests, and over a billion people benefit directly from forests. Unfortunately, the global forests have been shrinking as a whole according to the most recent forest resources assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Forest policy has been an essential tool for forest conservation and sustainable forest management. Many prominent forest policies have been implemented across the globe for such purposes, such as the well-known Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the nationwide natural forest conservation program and conversion of cropland to forest program in China, community forestry programs in many developing countries in the tropics, etc. These policies can significantly alter the goods and services forests provide, impacting the livelihoods of the local people who depend on forests for livelihood and indirectly reshaping the interactions between the socioeconomic and the environmental systems. Understanding the underlying mechanisms driving these complex integrated socio-environmental systems can provide insights on better designing forest policies that sustain ecosystem services forests provide and secure the livelihoods of forest-dependent people.

This session calls for papers that seek to address the theoretical, methodological and empirical issues to better understand the relationships between forest policies and any aspect of the integrated socio-environmental systems that either influence the goods and services forests provide, the livelihoods of the forest dependent people, and the interactions between the socioeconomic and the environmental systems. These topics include, but not limited to:
1) Socioeconomic, demographic and political impacts of forest policies (e.g., livelihood improvement, migration, inequality in benefit distribution, and income diversification) and the potential mechanisms for the success or failure of forest policies.
2) Environmental consequences of forest policies, such carbon and water exchange between the atmosphere of the forest ecosystem, habitat quality change and its influence on the biodiversity.
3) Feedback from forest ecosystems under a particular forest policy to the human system, affecting the forest-dependent people’s livelihoods.
4) Integrated approaches (e.g., agent-based modeling, system dynamic modeling) to explore human-environmental interactions as affected by forest policies

Please send your paper title and abstract with your PIN to the following organizers:


Dr. Conghe Song (csong@email.unc.edu)
Department of Geography
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Dr. Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (elizabeth.shapiro@duke.edu)
Nicholas School of Environment
Duke University

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda