WP 4 Adapting a local woodland management plan, Sweden

Demonstration adaptation project : Adapting a local woodland management plan to the impacts of climate change

Lycksele municipality is a small inland municipality with about 12,500 inhabitants, of which approximately 25 percent are forest land owners. 72 percent of the total land area in the municipality constitutes of woodland. The forest sector is thus an important source of income in the region.

The region has a long history of forest cultivation that dates back to when the first settlers inhabited the area in the beginning of the 17th century. The Sami people have inhabited the area for centuries before the first settlers arrived, and the reindeer herding is also an important source of income to many people, as well as the tourism connected to it.

The Swedish Forest University (SLU) is situated in the area. The university itself is situated in Umeå (130 km from Lycksele), and one research station specializing on woodland management is situated in Vindeln (80 km from Lycksele). In addition, There is also a forest museum in Lycksele where exhibitions, activities and seminars are held.

1) To increase the awareness and the interest among forest owners and citizens in which ways the forest management in the area of Lycksele today needs to adapt to climate change in the future.

2) Develop new methods of taking the local knowledge of woodland management into account when planning how to adapt future woodland management to climate change

3) Generate new ideas and initiatives from the adaptation of the woodland management plan that will lead to increased business opportunities for the woodland owners and forest companies

The first part is designed to create a community interest in the impacts that climate change will have on the forest and thus on forest management in Lycksele. The seminars will be open for the public and the lecturers/facilitators will be selected with assistance from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

The second part, the workshops, will be carried out through active co-operation between a small group of woodland owners, The Forest Agency (FA), SLU and Lycksele municipality The aim is to adapt a local woodland management plan in Lycksele municipality to the impacts of climate change. We will not carry out any field projects in the forest, but only adapt the plan. The local woodland owners’ collective experience from forest management is the starting point for the workshops. We will of course also use the results from the climate scenarios produced in work package 2, the information from the seminars as well as relevant articles as a starting point for our analysis. Experts from the Forest Museum, the Forest Agency and SLU will contribute with their knowledge as participants in the workshops.

When the local woodland management plan has been analysed we will use the computerized tool, PlanWise, recently developed in the research programme Heureka, in order to analyse and visualise possible scenarios in the forest. The tool makes it possible to plot the forest into a 3-D model of the forest. This means that we will be able to visualise the forest as it looks today as well as the future forest, when it’s management has been adapted to the impacts of climate change.

The third part will be implemented in co-operation with the Forest Museum and it will be based on the output from part two of the project. The final product will be one of many possible adaptation outcomes of the local woodland plan and not any kind of general truth of what a “climate change adapted” woodland management plan should look like. The “adapted” woodland management plan will be exhibited with the help of 3-D techniques and by creating a sensation, in the exhibition, of entering into a future, adapted forest. It is considered that the creation of interaction in the exhibition, as well as creating a sensation of entering into a future forest, will be an important part of the dissemination activity associated with the project.

Project plan

Expo “The Forest and Climate Change” opens 5 June 2010