Global trends and issues in the forest sector and challenges to forest research

摘要

Several major trends affect the future of the global forest sector. Deforestation, forest degradation and loss of biodiversity continue at an alarming rate. A shift of timber production from North to South is going on, and it also means a shift from natural and semi-natural forests to intensively managed plantations for growing industrial wood. A shift in consumption of forest products from Western Europe and North America to Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia will lead to a shift of the forest industryproduction to new regions. At the same time, information and communication technology has begun to influence paper demand toward reducing the use of some major paper grades. Although the high-level political attention has moved from forests to address other concerns, both international and national policies external to the forest sector will increasingly drive the development of the sector. Environmental and gradually also social sustainability are replacing the economic sustainability as a major driving force. This will support the march of non-wood and intangible products, such as environmental benefits and recreation. These global trends mean that the leading forest sector countries have to find new products and new business opportunities in orderto survive. The industry has to convert pulp mills to biorefineries whose outputs are not only traditional forest industry products but also bioenergy and wood chemistry products, as well as ingredients for medicines and functional food products. The changes in the forest sector create challenges to forest research. During the past few decades the traditional forest research has not succeeded very well in responding to the emerging changes. A clear symptom is that despite the general global increase inresearch funding, traditional forest research has experienced budget cuts in many countries and has partly lost ground to other disciplines. Therefore, forest researchers should create more collaboration with scientists and institutions who are interested in forest-related problems but who do not belong to the old forestry family. More collaboration and networking is also needed inside the conventional forest research community. When resources available for research are decreasing, it is important to increase efficiency by avoiding overlapping and duplicated work.