Unearthing the myths of global sustainable forest governance

Non-technical summary

Despite efforts to address the global forest crisis, deforestation and degradation continue, so we need to urgently revisit possible solutions. A failure to halt the global forest crisis contributes to climate change and biodiversity loss and will continue to result in inequalities in access to, and benefits from, forest resources. In this paper, we unpack a series of powerful myths about forests and their management. By exposing and better understanding these myths and what makes them so persistent, we have the basis to make the social and political changes needed to better manage and protect forests globally.

Technical summary

There is increasing recognition in the scientific community that environmental problems such as climate change are not just technological or engineering problems, but part of an ideational crisis. One particularly dominant idea is that sustainability problems can be solved by treating them as predominantly economic problems to be solved by market-based instruments or by mobilizing enough financial resources. In this article, we suggest that ideas like these are not only challenged by available scientific evidence about the best way to tackle the global forest crisis, but also produce socio-institutional lock-ins. We examine various myths underlying these lock-ins and show how they create barriers to transformations towards global forest sustainability. In the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we ask why we are stuck with seemingly ineffective and inequitable approaches to global forest governance. We examine deforestation and some of the currently discussed policy solutions such as carbon forestry, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and private forest governance. We aim to unearth these myths and explore their consequences, warning that, in many contexts, their prevalence may preclude other solutions that might be more effective. Finally, we consider the transformative changes that are needed to unlock these lock-ins through a combination of ‘counteractions’ for sustainable forest governance.

Social media summary

Myths about the global forest crisis need to be disrupted to sustainably govern and protect forests globally.