Forest-Based Climate Change Social Interventions: Towards a Theoretical Framework

The main purpose of this chapter was to develop a framework for forest-based climate change social interventions which was fulfilled using a multi-stage process. There is no doubt that forests are important to humans, plants, animals, and the planet as a whole. In other words, the ongoing deforestation process and land degradation caused by human activities and climate changes are considered as major challenges for sustainable development around the world. Despite the improvements achieved, there are still many problems with the sustainable protection, conservation, and management of forests in different areas. This necessity has been acknowledged by the need for government interventions at all levels. In the first step of this study, the importance of forest was highlighted in terms of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the second step, the planned/preventive forest-based climate change social intervention introduced as an effective way to reduce deforestation under climate change. In the third step, some enabling and constraining factors were proposed for successful implementation of forest-based climate change social interventions. In the fourth step, different types of the uses of forest-based climate change social interventions were critically analyzed. In the fifth stage, a typology were introduced for forest-based climate change social interventions. Finally, in light of the results of previous steps, a practical framework for forest-based social interventions under climate change was developed. In general the results of this chapter showed that in all types of forest-based climate change social interventions, the most important constraining factors include structural, political, organizational, economic, executive, collaborative, network building, and follow-up barriers. In addition, enabling factors of these interventions consist flexible designing, institutional analysis, long-term intervention, risk assessment, prioritizing local knowledge, site-specific intervention, socio-cultural forestry, non-profit incentives, social learning, and participation. The framework presented in this study can provide useful insights for forest ecosystem managers, policy-makers, decision-makers, and practitioners who are directly involved in the process of designing and implementing social interventions.