Incorporating a Global Perspective Into Future-Oriented Forest Management Scenarios: The Role of Forest Footprint Analysis

This research serves to integrate the concept of an “ecological footprint” into future-oriented forest management scenarios. Scenarios are commonly used to explore stakeholder perceptions of possible forest futures, and are typically focused on the local impacts of different management choices. This article illustrates how global footprint analysis can be incorporated into scenarios to enable local forest stakeholders in the EU to consider the impacts of their local decisions at national and global levels. This illustration could be helpful to the construction of a forest decision support system that includes wood trade information and social processes (simulation of management decisions under changing political/economic conditions). It finds that different future forest management scenarios involving a potential increase or decrease of the harvested timber, or potential increase or decrease of subsidies for forest protection, combined with various possible changes in local consumption patterns, might have impact on both “internal” (local) and “external” (non-local) forest footprints.