Program ID: Innovation Anthology #65
Program Date: 09/11/2007
Program Category: Climate Change, Environment, Forests, Social Sciences
SFMN Forest Futures Project
Forest covers almost half of Canada today but how much will be left on the landscape in the year 2050?
That’s a question researchers with the Sustainable Forest Management Network are striving to answer with a unique approach to predicting the future.
Dr. Peter Duinker of Dalhousie University is leading the Forest Futures Project. And he calls it a scenario based approach to understanding the future.
DR. PETER DUINKER: The idea of the project is to write or prepare a set of fairly different alternative stories or scenarios about how the forests or the forest sector could unfold given a set of assumptions about the key driving forces like global markets and climate change, and like attitudes towards the forests here in Canada and so on. And the idea in doing this is to start to think about which kinds of policies we may not have today that would be very smart to institute today so that we can prepare ourselves for the eventuality that any one of these stories could begin to unfold.
Dr. Peter Duinker says this scenario analysis will for the first time integrate all the forest science developed by network researchers.
Thanks today to the Sustainable Forest Management Network.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Images
Dr. Peter Duinker
