| 1. |
- Hallberg-Sramek, Isabella, et al.
(författare)
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Applying machine learning to media analysis improves our understanding of forest conflicts
- 2024
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Ingår i: Land use policy. - : Elsevier. - 0264-8377 .- 1873-5754. ; 144
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Conflicts over the management and governance of forests seem to be increasing. Previous media studies in this area have largely focused on analysing the portrayal of specific conflicts. This study aims to review how a broad range of forest conflicts are portrayed in the Swedish media, analysing their temporal, spatial, and relational dimensions. We applied topic modelling, a machine learning approach, to analyse 53,600 articles published in the Swedish daily press between 2012 and 2022. We identified 916 topics, of which 94 were of interest for this study. Our results showed ten areas of forest conflicts: hunting and fishing (35 % of total coverage), energy (24 %), recreation and tourism (11 %), nature conservation (8 %), forest damages (6 %), international issues (5 %), forestry (5 %), reindeer husbandry (4 %), media and politics (2 %), and mining (1 %). The overall coverage of forest conflicts increased significantly over the study period, potentially reflecting an actual increase in forest conflicts. Some of the conflicts were continuously reported upon over time, while the coverage of others exhibited seasonal or event-related patterns. Four conflicts received most of their coverage in specific regions, while others were covered across the whole of Sweden. A relational analysis of the conflicts revealed three clusters of forest conflicts focused respectively on industrial, cultural, and conservation conflicts. Our results emphasise the value of using topic modelling to understand the overall patterns and trends of the media coverage of current land use conflicts, while also highlighting potential areas of emerging conflicts that may be of special interest for planners and policy-makers to monitor and manage.
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| 2. |
- Hallberg-Sramek, Isabella, et al.
(författare)
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Bringing “Climate-Smart Forestry” Down to the Local Level : Identifying Barriers, Pathways and Indicators for Its Implementation in Practice
- 2022
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Ingår i: Forests. - : MDPI. - 1999-4907. ; 13:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The theoretical concept of “climate-smart forestry” aims to integrate climate change mitigation and adaptation to maintain and enhance forests’ contributions to people and global agendas. We carried out two local transdisciplinary collaboration processes with the aim of developing local articulations of climate-smart forestry and to identify barriers, pathways and indicators to applying it in practice. During workshops in northern and southern Sweden, local stakeholders described how they would like forests to be managed, considering their past experiences, future visions and climate change. As a result, the stakeholders framed climate-smart forestry as active and diverse management towards multiple goals. They identified several conditions that could act both as barriers and pathways for its implementation in practice, such as value chains for forest products and services, local knowledge and experiences of different management alternatives, and the management of ungulates. Based on the workshop material, a total of 39 indicators for climate-smart forestry were identified, of which six were novel indicators adding to the existing literature. Our results emphasize the importance of understanding the local perspectives to promote climate-smart forestry practices across Europe. We also suggest how the concept of climate-smart forestry can be further developed, through the interplay between theory and practice.
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| 3. |
- Hallberg-Sramek, Isabella, et al.
(författare)
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Combining scientific and local knowledge improves evaluating future scenarios of forest ecosystem services
- 2023
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Ingår i: Ecosystem Services. - : Elsevier. - 2212-0416 .- 2212-0416. ; 60
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Forest scenario analysis can help tackle sustainability issues by generating insight into the potential long-term effects of present-day management. In northern Sweden, forests provide important benefits including climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, reindeer husbandry, local livelihoods, and recreation. Informed by local stakeholders’ views on how forests can be enabled to deliver these benefits, we created four forest management scenarios: the close-to-nature scenario (CTN) which emphasises biodiversity conservation, the classic management scenario (CLA) optimising the forests’ net present value, the intensified scenario (INT) maximising harvested wood from the forest, and the combined scenario (COM) applying a combination of measures from the CTN and INT. The scenarios were applied to the local forest landscape and modelled over a 100-year simulation period, and the results of the modelling were then evaluated by a diverse group of stakeholders. For most ecosystem services, there was a time lag of 10–50 years before noticeable effects and differences between the scenarios became evident, highlighting the need to consider both the short- and long-term effects of forest management. Evaluation by the stakeholders put the modelled results into a local context. They raised considerations relating to wildlife and hunting, climate change risks, social acceptability, and conflict, highlighting the value of evaluating the scenarios qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Overall, stakeholders thought that the CTN and CLA scenarios promoted more ecosystem services and posed fewer climate risks, while also creating less conflict among stakeholders. Our results emphasise the value of combining scientific and local knowledge when developing and evaluating future forest scenarios.
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| 4. |
- Hallberg-Sramek, Isabella, et al.
(författare)
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Framing woodland key habitats in the Swedish media : how has the framing changed over time?
- 2020
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0282-7581 .- 1651-1891. ; 35:3-4, s. 198-209
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concept of woodland key habitats is well-established in northern Europe, denoting sites in the forest landscape with particularly high biodiversity. In Sweden, woodland key habitats have been inventoried on individual forest owner’s land by the Swedish Forest Agency since 1993. Recently, various actors have questioned the woodland key habitat concept and its policy implications. To investigate how framing of the concept has changed over time we conducted a media analysis based on theories of collective action frames. The analysis covered the period 1991–2018 and a total of 293 articles in daily newspapers. Our results showed that, over time, woodland key habitats have mostly been framed by government agencies, journalists and environmental organizations as suffering as a result of forestry practices and that nature conservation is the solution to this problem. Actors presenting other or conflicting frames are not as common and they occur mostly when the frequency of articles is high. However, it is noteworthy that individual forest owners sometimes framed themselves as suffering economically from the woodland key habitats, which contrasts with the dominant framing. There were no large differences between national and regional newspapers in the framing of woodland key habitats.
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| 5. |
- Hallberg Sramek, Isabella
(författare)
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Tailoring forest management to local socio-ecological contexts : Addressing climate change and local stakeholders’ expectations of forests
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Forests are expected to provide multiple ecosystem services and mitigate climate change whilst also being adapted to the impacts of climate change. This thesis aims to analyse these competing expectations placed on forests in Sweden and how to tailor forest management locally to meet them by (i) applying machine learning to analyse forest conflicts in daily media from 2012 to 2022 and (ii) collaborating with local forest stakeholders to co-produce locally-tailored forest management pathways in two study areas in Sweden. The results showed that media coverage of forest conflicts has increased over time and that the conflicts concerned why and for whom forests should be managed. The co-production processes additionally highlighted expectations of how forests should be managed. Overall, the local stakeholders wanted to diversify forest management to enable more multifunctional and climate-smart forests, whilst they also stressed several conditions that may enable or disable its implementation in practice, depending on how they are handled. To adapt forest management to climate change impacts, the stakeholders emphasised the value of learning from past experiences and continuously improving management in line with an adaptive forest management approach. To limit climate change, they argued that it is necessary to consider climate change mitigation holistically and in conjunction with climate change adaptation and forests’ provision of ecosystem services. By collaborating with local stakeholders and combining their context-based local knowledge with forest science, this thesis developed a broader and pluralistic understanding of forest management while enabling collaborative learning. In summary, this thesis highlights competing expectations placed on forests in Sweden and the value of co-production processes to tailor forest management to local socio-ecological contexts in collaboration with local stakeholders.
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| 6. |
- Kauppi, Pekka E, et al.
(författare)
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Managing existing forests can mitigate climate change
- 2022
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Ingår i: Forest Ecology and Management. - : Elsevier BV. - 0378-1127 .- 1872-7042. ; 513
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Planting new forests has received scientific and political attention as a measure to mitigate climate change. Large, new forests have been planted in places like China and Ethiopia and, over time, a billion hectares could become available globally for planting new forests. Sustainable management of forests, which are available to wood production, has received less attention despite these forests covering at least two billion hectares globally. Better management of existing forests would improve forest growth and help mitigate climate change by increasing the forest carbon (C) stock, by storing C in forest products, and by generating wood-based materials substituting fossil C based materials or other CO2-emission-intensive materials. Some published research assumes a trade-off between the timber harvested from existing forests and the stock of C in those forest ecosystems, asserting that both cannot increase simultaneously. We tested this assumption using the uniquely detailed forest inventory data available from Finland, Norway and Sweden, hereafter denoted northern Europe. We focused on the period 1960 - 2017, that saw little change in the total area covered by forests in northern Europe. At the start of the period, rotational forestry practices began to diffuse, eventually replacing selective felling management systems as the most common management practice. Looking at data over the period we find that despite significant increases in timber and pulp wood harvests, the growth of the forest C stock accelerated. Over the study period, the C stock of the forest ecosystems in northern Europe increased by nearly 70%, while annual timber harvests increased at the about 40% over the same period. This increase in the forest C stock was close to on par with the CO2-emissions from the region (other greenhouse gases not included). Our results suggest that the important effects of management on forest growth allows the forest C stock and timber harvests to increase simultaneously. The development in northern Europe raises the question of how better forest management can improve forest growth elsewhere around the globe while at the same time protecting biodiversity and preserving landscapes.
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| 7. |
- Priebe, Janina, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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The spectrum of knowledge : Integrating knowledge dimensions in the context of forests and climate change
- 2023
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - : Springer. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 18, s. 1329-1341
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Integrated approaches to knowledge that recognize meaning, behavior, culture, and systems as domains of knowledge are increasingly employed in holistic views on sustainability transformation but often remain conceptually driven. In this study, we analyze empirical data from a collaborative process with local forest stakeholders in Sweden through the lens of individual, collective, interior, and exterior knowledge dimensions. We show that the participants’ understanding of knowledge about forests and climate change presents a nuanced picture of how knowledge and acting are connected. Meaning-making, cultural frames, and techno-scientific knowledge conceptions converge, interact, and, at times, replace or diminish each other. The connection and interplay of these dimensions, we suggest, can be understood as a knowledge spectrum. These insights into integrated knowledge, based on an empirical case, must be addressed in the production of knowledge, both to grasp the climate and sustainability issues that face us and to support action in response to them.
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| 8. |
- Priebe, Janina, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Transformative change in context : stakeholders’ understandings of leverage at the forest–climate nexus
- 2022
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Ingår i: Sustainability Science. - : Springer. - 1862-4065 .- 1862-4057. ; 17:5, s. 1921-1938
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Transformation acquires its meaning within contexts and particular settings where transformative change is experienced, and where people engage in meaning-making. We used the forest–climate nexus in Sweden as an empirical case study, and the leverage-points perspective as an analytical lens. The aim was to investigate contextual leverage for transformative change, and how our use of context and relations shapes our understanding of transformation and leverage for change. The empirical basis was a whole-day workshop, held in both northern and southern Sweden, for local forest stakeholders. To detract from current conflict and barriers to change, we asked the stakeholders to reflect on transformative change in the past and in the future, and the spatio-temporal relations that form the forest–climate nexus. Our analysis suggests that leverage associated with a transformative change in the future is commonly seen as universal and detached from context, reflecting, for example, national and global discourses on forests and climate change. Regarding transformative changes in the past, however, contextual leverage is linked to the community values and pluralism that drove the change in particular situations. Focusing on the complex spatio-temporal relations and meaning-making helps identify how leverage emerges from context, and how leverage also acquires a richer meaning for people experiencing transformative change.
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| 9. |
- Reimerson, Elsa, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Local articulations of climate action in Swedish forest contexts
- 2023
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Ingår i: Environmental Science and Policy. - : Elsevier. - 1462-9011 .- 1873-6416. ; 151
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Local actors are recognized as key drivers for climate action. Making climate change relevant and possible to act on in local contexts is thus a critical undertaking for both researchers and society at large. Connecting climate change to people’s known surroundings and experiences, and framing climate action in relation to everyday practices in the local context, might then be crucial to making climate change relevant and actionable on the local level. In this paper, we explore the potential of forests to serve as such a connection. We have worked in close collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders in two case study locations in Sweden to explore potential courses of action for local climate action in relation to forests. We critically analyze these local articulations of climate action and examine the assumptions underlying them, with the aim to assess the effects and consequences of different problem representations. Our results illustrate the challenges of thinking and acting outside of the prevalent business-as-usual or more-of-everything discourses, of recognizing the importance of politics and choice, and of overcoming perceived barriers to action. We find tensions in the allocation of responsibility in both time and space – but also potential room for more local action in assumptions of un- or underused potential for political and civil action on the local level.
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| 10. |
- von Essen, Malin
(författare)
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Ta ner himlen till jorden : skogen, klimatet och allt det andra
- 2022
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Rapport (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Alla vet att det är bråttom att göra en hållbar omställning. Det har aldrig tidigare funnits en så stor medvetenhet om detta med så mycket kunskap, teknik och styrmedel. Trots det står omställningen och stampar. Kanske hjälper det att vända på perspektivet och belysa hur förändring kan uppstå ur ett mänskligt och lokalt perspektiv? Hur kan förändring ske som är inkluderande och ger människor möjligheter att ta kontroll över sin situation?”Ta ner himlen till jorden” har undersökt hur skogen kan användas för att göra klimatfrågan konstruktivt angripbar i lokala sammanhang. I denna skrift presenteras resultat och lärdomar från forskningsprojektet. Dessutom presenteras hur forskarna försökt skapa ringar på vattnet genom sitt arbetssätt, bland annat med hjälp av studiecirklar.
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