Risk aversion hinders forestry professionals to adapt to climate change
- PDF / 3,153,934 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 199 Views
Risk aversion hinders forestry professionals to adapt to climate change M. Brunette 1,2
& M. Hanewinkel
3
& R. Yousefpour
3
Received: 28 October 2019 / Accepted: 20 May 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Forestry professionals’ attitudes towards risk and uncertainty under climate change, together with their perception about suitability of adaptation strategies, were investigated in Central Europe. We applied an original methodology based on lottery choices to quantify their risk and uncertainty attitude, combined with a questionnaire study about the adaptation to climate change. We tested the hypothesis that the higher the risk and uncertainty aversion of respondents, the higher the trend towards changing business-as-usual to adaptive decisions. The result falsifies the research hypothesis since uncertainty aversion has no effect, whereas risk aversion has a negative impact on the decision to adapt. We argue that risk of any change in the business-as-usual is higher than the expected risk of climate change impact in Central European forestry. We conclude that having access to novel information about expected impacts of climate change, taking into account institutional challenges and supportive experiences about useful adaptation strategies, may convince forestry professionals to adapt in the future. Keywords Adaptation . Risk . Uncertainty . Lottery choice . Forest . Perception
* M. Brunette [email protected] M. Hanewinkel [email protected] R. Yousefpour [email protected]
1
Université de Lorraine, Université de Strasbourg, AgroParisTech, CNRS, INRAE, BETA, Nancy, France
2
Associate researcher at the Climate Economics Chair (CEC), Paris, France
3
Forestry Economics and Forest Planning, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
Climatic Change
1 Introduction 1.1 Problem statement Climate change has serious impacts on forest ecosystems through the increase in temperature and the modification of the precipitation regime. One of the main concerns is that climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disturbances (Van Aalst 2006). In this sense, climate change is associated with reduction in forest growth and productivity, defoliation, and mortality. In a context where forests have an increasing role, especially as a carbon sink, governments are under pressure to implement policies and investment projects for climate change adaptation (Van Aalst 2006; HochrainerStigler et al. 2014). As a consequence, many forest adaptation strategies are recommended (Bolte et al. 2009; Keenan 2015; Brunette et al. 2018), such as the reduction of the rotation length and tree density, as well as the change in the thinning regime or species mix (Spittlehouse and Stewart 2003; Yousefpour and Hanewinkel 2014). Changes in business-as-usual (BAU) strategies, which were empirically recognized as the best management strategies for the previous environmental conditions, are needed as changes in environmental systems, for example climate, are reali
Data Loading...
