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Forest discourses help identify forest-related issues. They aim to aid policy and decision-makers in understanding forest-related challenges and opportunities better so that they may initiate possible strategies and tactics to tackle them. Ideally, information requirements for the forest discourses would be translated into measurable variables, being the basis for collecting, analysing, and reporting data and information. Our study examined the connection between major international forest reporting processes and forest discourses. We analysed summaries and key findings for policy makers of five recent major forest reports. We compared their focus with forest discourses on climate change, forest conservation, deforestation, forest decline, illegal logging, industrial forestry/bioeconomy, traditional knowledge, woody biomass production, and innovative wood-based biofuels. The paper explores how the forest discourses are reflected in the surveyed documents and closely examines the specific focus areas in the summaries for policy makers. The results show that most forest discourses are generally well-represented, albeit with different foci. The discourse on illegal logging could not be identified in any investigated documents, even though it remains a significant concern for international forest policy. Keywords related to traditional knowledge and woody biomass production could not be found in two of the analysed findings. All analysed summaries and key findings mention issues related to the climate change discourse topic. However, they lack information on emissions from deforestation, carbon dioxide emissions and carbon budgets, which are high in political discussions. The paper highlights how discourse issues have gained in complexity both topic-wise and regarding the reporting obligations, as policy and decisionmakers require more timely and comprehensive information about the status' and trends of forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this pilot study, we examine the relationship between the organisation of property rights and the economic importance of forestry on the one hand and the degree to which integrative nature conservation is formally implemented in forest policy on the other hand. Further, we are interested in whether political institutions moderate this relationship. We first offer a conceptualization of integrative nature conservation in forests and how to measure its implementation in law, ordinances and private agreements for a sample of European national and sub-national jurisdictions (Austria, Croatia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Flanders, Baden-Württemberg and Piedmont). We subsequently try to assess the implementation of these rules and to relate them both to the structural characteristics of forestry and to an appraisal of pluralism in forest policy. Our qualitative analysis reveals that among the jurisdictions with a more centralized and corporatist forest policy, integrative nature conservation in forests tend to be less formally implemented the more corporatism dominates decision-making. It also confirms the expectation that among the more consensual jurisdictions with a strong forestry sector, rules tend to be less formally implemented. Further, the suspicion prevails that in the latter case, such rules are either complemented with exceptions for private forests or higher compensation. A more in-depth comparative examination is needed to further corroborate these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades after the pan-European set of indicators for sustainable forest management was adopted, the European Commission published the New EU Forest Strategy for 2030. We compared the documents on the basis of a content analysis to determine whether they share the same understanding of sustainable forest management. We looked at whether, and to what extent, the existing indicator set is fit for purpose to monitor progress towards the Strategy's objectives, and the delivery of policy commitments. About two thirds of the identified objectives and commitments in the Strategy can be monitored at least partially by the pan-European set of indicators, whereas new indicators or approaches need to be developed for the remaining third. Several of the indicators are not linked to the Strategy, and some of them are only weakly linked to the policy issues addressed in the Strategy. Our comparison shows a few significant differences between the comprehensive vision of sustainable forest management formulated in the indicator set and the scope of the objectives and commitments in the Strategy. In particular, the forest policy concerns reflected in the Strategy address several issues which are not fully covered in the pan-European indicator set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sustainable and circular bioeconomy is a pathway to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 because the bioeconomy relates to a number of SDGs. We therefore focused on whether and how these SDGs are considered in national bioeconomy strategies, and on their indicator-based progress monitoring and assessment. This paper is based on eight countries that already have elaborated indicators in their national bioeconomy strategies. We analyzed the coverage of SDG issues in national bioeconomy strategies and the indicators used. We focused on how the different national indicators used to monitor the progress of the bioeconomy are related to the SDGs indicators and the already well established and widely applied intergovernmental regional or international forest-related indicators, as the forest sector is one of the key sectors for the development of a bioeconomy. Our material and methods are based on a document review and qualitative analysis of national bioeconomy strategies and their inherent indicator sets for progress monitoring. Based on our findings on the coverage of SDG-related issues of up to 14 out of the 17 SDGs in the bioeconomy strategies and of the high share of forest-related indicators within the bioeconomy indicators used, we derive recommendations for the further development of bioeconomy indicators. Our paper does not contribute to proposing the most suitable indicators, but it does encourage national and regional actors to carefully and holistically develop their bioeconomy monitoring systems using synergies from the already existing SDGs and forest monitoring processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]