Perspectives: The license to fail – Steps towards an adaptive paradigm for forest management in times of unprecedented uncertainty

作者：Simon Reinhold, Olef Koch, Andreas Schweiger, Roderich von Detten · 发表于：Forest Ecology and Management · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.foreco.2025.122653 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Forest Management and Policy、Environmental Conservation and Management、Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

This article offers a new perspective on possible consequences of looking at uncertainty in forest ecosystem management as something irreducible. Management strategies suggested by forest science are often focused on minimizing uncertainty by using predictive or probabilistic models and risk management via diversification in order to enable the achievement of relatively rigid targets or desired ecosystem conditions. These approaches, however, do not fully capture the complex, dynamic nature of forest ecosystems and the challenges ecosystem managers face as societal needs and the world’s climate are changing in an unprecedented manner. The fact that a good proportion of future events is unpredictable and that forest ecosystem management has to find ways to act upon this uncertainty precisely because it is irreducible is often overlooked. The conceptual background for this publication was drawn from considerations on uncertainty and entrepreneurial action in both forest sciences and economics. Building on that, we argue that the understanding of forests as complex and adaptive socio-ecological systems has to be better represented in systematic and hierarchical structures. Central to sector-wide innovation and adaptation is a new management paradigm: A better understanding of ecosystem dynamics in real-time and a substitution of approaches that are designed to plan or steer ecosystems with experimental proceedings via trial and error. Therefore, we propose a theoretical workflow...