It’s Scottish Climate Week and we are taking a look at the importance of making our forests and woodlands resilient for the future.

There are many reasons why resilient forests are vital, as Helen Sellars, Scottish Forestry’s Head of Sustainable Forest Management, explains in this question and answer blog.

Why do we need to build resilience?
We are all becoming increasingly aware of the impacts of climate change, and as well as planting trees to help mitigate it, we also need to make sure that Scotland’s forest resource is able to be resilient to a future climate.  In Scotland, we are facing hotter drier summers and warmer wetter winters. This changing climate will also mean an increase in the range of threats we face, as well an increase in the frequency and severity of impacts they cause. These threats include increased pest and disease outbreaks, storms, flooding, drought and wildfire. Unfortunatley all of these threats are predicted to become increasingly common over the coming years.

How to build resilience?
We are using the framework of resist, adapt, respond and recover.

Within this framework we can use a selection of measures such as:

• better planning for risk in forest design plans;
• increasing the diversity of species; provenance choice; structure and age; scale;
• more use of management methods such as thinning and natural regeneration;
• tree breeding for resistance;
• monitoring and surveillance; and
• contingency planning for response and recovery to events.

What is stopping us?
Some challenges are around unblocking barriers such as the as availability and confidence in additional species and the supply chain.  We also need to invest in skills and building knowledge and experience - for example Storm Arwen has reminded foresters of the threat of wind after a run of quiet years.

Also, with high levels of uncertainty, it is difficult to know how much resilience to build into a forest. There is not one overall resilience prescription and improving resilience will need to take into account factors such as location, site and scale. We will need to use the framework principles of adapt, resist, respond and recover and ensure all these issues are balanced.

What is Scottish Forestry doing to increase resilience in forests?
Scottish forestry has undertaken a collaborative cross-sector approach.  We have an active cross-sector Adaptation and Resilience Steering Group in the final stage of developing a ‘Building Resilient Future Woodlands and Forests Strategic Action Plan’ to address the barriers and challenges we face.  This will set the direction for achieving outcomes in the key priority areas of Planning, Species Choice and Silviculture, and Knowledge Exchange.  This Plan will be published in the next few months.  

The Steering Group is also working on a key action on species choice, aiming to broaden the choice of species to deliver for sustainable forest management. Two cross-sector workshops have been held already on this issue, and a set of criteria has been developed, along with large amounts of data, to provide the evidence base to help create a short-list of species.  The final short list of species will be published in the coming months.   Further actions will then follow to build capacity in relation to this list with actions included to increase availability, tree breeding programmes and silvicultural knowledge. 

We have also started work to increase knowledge exchange with initially a series of Scottish Forestry/ICF webinars. The next webinar is to be on Resilience and Species Choice by Dr Helen Sellars (Scottish Forestry) and Dr David Edwards (Forest Research) on the 2 October.