The future of the forest management industry: Highly mechanized plantations and reserves or a knowledge-intensive integrated approach?

Abstract

Intensive forest management has commonly become associated with forest plantations that have high initial investment costs in stand establishment. These intensive plantations will probably not produce high quality wood because they will be physically and economically unstable if grown to long rotations, and so will probably need to be harvested when quite young. An alternative to intensive plantations is integrated management, where more understanding of many ways to grow forests is substituted for the high initial costs of uniform, mechanized treatments used in plantations. This paper is intended to generate a discussion of the economic, social, and environmental desirability of these, and alternative, management approaches. Forest policy is presently moving in several directions, with some policies encouraging intensive plantations and other policies encouraging integrated management. All policy directions require government intervention to some degree to deal with the apparent surplus of low quality wood. Either governments will prohibit harvest of most of the world's forests and promote intensive plantations on the remaining area, or they will actively promote integrated management through various incentives and/or restrictions. Unless a consistent policy emerges, there will continue to be confusion in forest management that could last for decades. This confusion will be to the economic, social, and environmental detriment of most of the public and most forest landowners.