Putting results to usePeter Duinker sees many similarities between the Canadian landscape and that of Sweden. Both have huge tracts of forest and an associated forest and pulp industry with a major role in the economy. Several times, his work has brought him to Sweden: through a major research project and to be an ‘opponent’ in a couple of students’ ‘disputations’ (public defences of their PhD theses). Now, his trips to Sweden are likely to multiply owing to his collaboration with Future Forests.‘One difference between our project in Canada and your Future Forests is that we have a lot of the research and results behind us. Now, for the next two years, we’ll be trying to work out how to make practical use of the findings and develop a policy of sustainable forest development for the 21st century,’ Duinker relates.
One similarity between the projects — and the one that brings him to Sweden — lies in the various scenarios that are drawn up in both the Canadian and the Swedish project. Duinker hopes that the different programmes will be able to benefit from each other and bring about a kind of cross-fertilisation.
‘One hope is that we’ll be able to compare forest development based on the Swedish and Canadian conditions respectively — in terms of forest industry as a staple economic sector, forests as places for recreation and, not least, their trends and bearing on climate change.’
Forest in focus
Peter Duinker’s research interest includes both biological and sociopolitical issues, usually focusing on forests. His work has covered everything from forest ecology to environmental taxation, decision-making about natural resources to sustainable forest systems and criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, conflict resolution to climate change.
He is also a frequently consulted advisor to Canadian state-owned and private enterprises. If he had to identify one issue as more important than any other it would undoubtedly be climate change.
‘It’s going to affect us all severely, and what worries me is that it’s taken such a tremendously long time to get world leaders to take the matter seriously. In planning measures intended to slow down trends, we must start with the worst conceivable scenario,’ he says.
Forests are a key element in the economy and one way in which forest trends are crucial is in their impact on our management of climate change, Peter Duinker thinks.
‘For one thing, the ever warmer climate is going to bring increasingly frequent and severe storms. So for the forest industry, it’s essential to create forests that are as resilient as possible. When storms and hurricanes hit us, we must make sure that whole forests don’t blow away. That would be a catastrophe in terms of forestry economics as well as the climate,’ he says.
One way of making forests more resilient is, for example, to plant mixed stocks comprising different species of tree, or to mix young and old trees in the same forest in order thereby to mitigate the consequences of the ever more frequent and violent storms.
Pessimist and optimist
Duinker has followed the climate issue with growing anxiety over the past 20 years, and he still finds it difficult, as a researcher, to get people to pay heed to the ever more alarming information. But today there is, at least, scientific literature available on the subject and it is considerably easier to get research grants in the field than when his personal interest in it began.
‘I swing between being a pessimist and an optimist. I think the turning-point on the climate issue, by which I mean the year when we really get a grip on it, will be 2015. We’re now, in fact, seeing a trend of more and more people getting the message,’ Peter Duinker concludes.
