Safeguarding against Harm in a Climate-Smart Forest Economy: Definitions, Challenges, and Solutions

Sustainably managed forests and forest products have a well-documented potential to deliver significant climate change mitigation benefits via sequestration, storage, and substitution (the 3Ss) when they are sourced sustainably and substituted for traditional resource-intensive materials. Moving beyond product-specific considerations, a climate-smart forest economy (CSFE) aims to bolster the 3Ss and catalyze broader systemic change to address the climate crisis. In their most successful cases, forest value chain interventions that lead to CSFEs will link secondary and tertiary sectors for greater waste reduction, substitution, innovation, and overall cascading climate benefits. However, interventions that contribute to CSFEs, from small to large scale, will inevitably impact environments and communities, both directly and indirectly. While positive impacts can be thought of as co-benefits and should be encouraged, negative impacts are considered negative externalities, and these should be avoided or minimized wherever possible by safeguarding against harm. The failure to minimize negative externalities will have implications for equity, project longevity, and climate benefits. This paper provides preliminary results of mixed methods research with an aim of identifying and building consensus on the definitions, challenges, and solutions relevant to the assessment, planning, and implementation of CSFE safeguards. While broad and novel CSFE safeguards application faces diverse challenges, this paper explores practical solutions to advance and set a foundation for future dialogue, analysis, and application.