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Project Description - General Information
Climate change policies have to include forest adaptation policies and need to be designed on the basis of the real human behavior towards climate changes, and not on the human behavior assumed by the economists, policy-makers or modelers (Kant et al., 2009).
The main objective of this research is to identify the perceptions, the opinions and the attitude of the main actors concerning the impact of the climate changes over the way of forest management. There are at least two reasons to justify the need for this study:
1. The environment sustainability is now under the influence of climate changes
2. Forests are one of the key-ecosystems in the carbon balance.
The first step of this study is to find out which will be the most suitable approach for studying the human behavior in the context of adaptation of forest management to the climate changes.
The chosen approach should allow:
- To identify the actual knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes and expectations of the stakeholders;
- To anticipate the changes of the attitudes/ behaviour towards different climate scenarios and which links the stakeholder behaviour to actual measures or effects on the forest management.
Research questions:
- Which is the attitude of the relevant stakeholders concerning the climate change: ignoring? Preventing? Learning? Accepting? Denying?
- How this attitude appears/ is built up, and which factors can explain the evolution of this attitude, from denying climate change influence to searching adaptive forest management strategies?
- How to include the stakeholders opinions and attitudes in the forest modelling and how to estimate the human behaviour impact an sustainability of forest management; which practices and measures climate change-induced will be implemented?
Objectives -
The main objective of the analysis is to improve the knowledge about actual human behavior with respect to climate change affecting sustainability of forest management.
Specific objective
- Identify and anticipate stakeholder’s behavior under climate change threats.
- Incorporate diversities of human behavior in modeling forest dynamics climate change scenarios.
Target population is represented by two stakeholder’s categories relevant for the Romanian forest policy context: landowners and forest managers.
Research methodology - Designing the research - Taking count of the main objective of this research, that of to identify the opinions and the attitudes of the main actors concerning the impact of the climate changes over the forest management, the projection of the research adopted an inter-disciplinary methodology, resulting in a linear projection of the stages of the analysis.
Mainly, the approach of this research integrates both the qualitative one and the quantitative one. The research objectives direct the methodological approach to the research methods specifics to Sociology.
The primary collecting of the data
Taking count of the inter-disciplinary character of the study, the primary collecting of the data is based on a technique which combines the individual interviews with questionnaires and with the analysis groups.
The interview types. The individual interview, face to face, semi-structure, with opened answers, is considered to be the most adequate technique for collecting the qualitative data for this research, being a very useful instrument in identifying a large range of answers. Taking count of the established objectives, the structuring of the interviews follows the testing of the perceptions concerning the impact of the different scenarios of evolution of the climate on the management of the forest ecosystem types.
The selection of the experts group. A basis with 60 potential experts was created to cover the diverse activity domains, persons who will be contacted to offer an interview in this scope
:i) from the institutional sphere there were chosen persons with decision power at the resort Minister, RNP- Romsilva, ITRSV and APM, and also representatives of the Employers' Association of Wood Industry;
ii) from the sphere of the private business environment there were chosen representative companies at the national level from the wood industry , through the business number and the number of employers;
iii) from the civil society sphere there were chosen the national or international ONGs which have activities in the forest domain, and also there were chosen specialised persons from the Academic level, University and from ICAS.
Pre-testing interview: there will be done at the seminar “The role of forests in the carbon storage and climate change control” organised by the Association for forest certification (ACF) together with WWF Danube-Carpathian Programme on 16.12.2012.
Pre-testing interviews will be made both before and after the introduction of the theoretical aspects concerning the effects of the climate changes on forests which also allows the identification of the way in which the opinions of the different respondent groups can be influenced by the knowledge of the respondents concerning the climate change problem.
The type of chosen theoretical approach and its argumentation.
This research will approach on one side the individual perceptions concerning the climate change and the way in which they are influenced by the social environment and by the institutional background, and on the other side this research will record what are the perceptions of the individual concerning the possibilities of adapting the forest management in the case of the climate changes.
Expected results - The result of this study will be the elaboration of the recommended practices taking into account the real behavior of the interested parts and the effective adaptation of the forest management strategies in accordance with the climate changes.
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