The calm before the storm: How climate change drives forestry evolutions

International audienceAdapting forest management to climate change is a key issue, as forests are crucial for mitigation policies and the provision of many ecosystem services. Understanding the magnitude of the progress made in this respect can help shape further adaptation developments and avoid the putative maladaptive side effects of forest management evolutions. Here, we aim to bridge the knowledge gap of adaptation implementation in French forests. To stay as close as possible to concrete changes, we conducted semi-structured interviews with foresters in two study areas that differed in the intensity of their forest management approaches. Our findings highlight unprecedented aspects of adaptations: (i) adaptation focuses on productive ecosystem services at the expense of other essential services such as water supply or natural habitats; (ii) adaptations rely on technical changes in forest management and do not deal with climate impacts through organizational or economic tools; and (iii) envisaging ecological processes through adaptations is instrumental and limited to small spatial and temporal scales. Our results also extend the existing body of knowledge to the framework of forest management: (i) climate change is not the main driver of forestry changes; (ii) extreme events are windows of opportunity to stimulate adaptive changes; and (iii) proactive adaptation to unexperienced hazards is very weak. We argue that to be as effective as possible, climate change adaptation in forestry should implement complementary organizational and economic changes in addition to the necessary technical evolutions