Young researchers enhance Future Forests
60 researchers are directly involved in Future Forests. About 20 of them are young, postdoctoral and associated researchers. “I guess what makes it really interesting for me is working at the edge of something and you can see that this might have some practical value", says Lucy Rist, one of Future Forests´ post-doctoral researchers.
Lucy Rist is from Great Britain and completed a PhD at Imperial College in London two years ago. Then she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, before she was recruited to Future Forests/Umeå University in the spring of 2010. Her research focus is resilience and sustainability in social-ecological forest systems. - It is hard to find a project that offers a good combination of ecological science and social science. Future Forests had all of the things I was looking for. For me it is also very different to work in Sweden, previously I´ve only been working in the tropics. Sweden sounded like a great country so I thought, why not! Most of postdoctoral and associated researchers in Future Forests are from Sweden but quite a few have international origins from Great Britain, USA, Canada, Germany, Holland and Spain. Their wholehearted commitment enhances the program and generates fresh energy from within. - When they are getting to know each other, new interactions are developing between the different scientific disciplines that Future Forests has brought together. These young researchers are also responsible for major research initiatives within the various component projects, says Annika Nordin, Future Forests´ Program Director.
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Lucy Rist
Hi Daryl,
Sustainability has indeed become a wide-ranging term that can be applied to almost every facet of life. “Maintain", "support", or "supply” are all given in a dictionary but the question, as you indicate, should really be maintain what? or support what? Currently the term has a strong underlying focus on supporting human utilisation; indeed the Brundtland commission, from whose 1987 report most definitions are drawn, was created to address growing concerns "about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development." I think this focus has been, sometimes unwittingly, quite substantially overlooked in the last decade, and that this has been to our detriment in tackling some major environmental challenges. For example, flawed assumptions about wellbeing and development path and the need to fundamentally question current consumption and lifestyle patterns.
In terms of something more operational within the Program itself we have been looking to Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and the various sets of Principles, Criteria and Indicators that this offers. While based on forest utilisation, interpretations of sustainability in these have broadened quite significantly to reflect additional demands, particularly biodiversity protection and to some extent also ecosystem function. However, I think we are still left with a problem of scale. SFM can be useful at the stand or landscape level, or in planning for a single rotation, but it doesn’t seem to help us when we want to tackle questions such as - at the national level how should Sweden be using, managing and conserving its forests? And how should we do so in the face of climate change and other environmental, social and economic drivers of major uncertainty. For this reason we are also looking at resilience theories to see if, and how, they can inform decision making more effectively at multiple levels.
# 5
Monday, 20 September at 15:43
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daryl suen
also, i think it is refreshing to hear about sociology being involved in environmental issues. human mentality and the environment appear to be connected dynamically through cause and effect and feedback loops. i think it's also important to understand why the concern of the public about the environment does not seem to grow proportionally with the degree of environmental destruction.
# 2
Tuesday, 24 August at 12:50
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daryl suen
what does sustainability mean? long term forest products for humans? sustained biodiversity levels? stable ecosystem functioning? i think each point of view has its own definition or notion of word "sustainability" and we need to be specific about which point of view we are addressing when we use this term.
# 1
Tuesday, 24 August at 10:17
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