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Episode 9: Not About Trees
74 Plays9 days ago
The final episode of Season 2 of Branching Out: The Forest Podcast, hosted by Jose Bolaños from IUFRO HQ, focused on IUFRO Scientific Division 9 – Forest Policy and Economics. The episode features Janette Bulkan from the University of British Columbia in Canada and Lukas Giessen from the Technical University Dresden in Germany, along with co-host Gerda Wolfrum from IUFRO HQ. Janette and Lukas coordinate Working Parties on Indigenous peoples and forest landscapes and A.I. methods in forest social sciences, respectively.
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Transcript
Introduction & Host Details
00:00:00
Speaker
According to the famous quote by Jack Westerby, ah forestry is not about trees, it's about people. And it is only about trees in so far as they can serve the needs of people.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello everyone, I'm your host Jose Voláñez from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, IUFRO, the Global Network for Forest Science Collaboration, and you are listening to Season 2 of Branching Out, the Forest Podcast.
00:00:34
Speaker
It's great to have you with us as we explore more forest science. Today is the time for IUFRO Scientific Division 9, Forest Policy and Economics. This is the last episode of this season, and we have a surprise for you. Since we have already heard Division 9 co-coordinators Monica Gavai and Jinlong Liu in our first season, we are very happy to welcome two guests today who will take us on a deeper dive into the inner workings of the Division.
00:01:03
Speaker
My colleague Gerda Wolfram, who coordinates communication at IUFU headquarters, is here with us to co-host the episode. Over to
Guest Introductions & Roles
00:01:11
Speaker
you, Gerda. Thank you, Jose. Thank you for this invitation to be a co-host. It's my first time on the podcast and I'm very excited about it.
00:01:20
Speaker
I've been with Ayufra for a long time and I've always wanted to have our own podcast show. So I'm thrilled to start my podcasting career with this special Division 9 edition.
00:01:32
Speaker
And very welcome to Branching Out. I hope you will enjoy the experience. Now it is time to introduce our guests. They are Janet Vulcan from the University of British Columbia in Canada and Lucas Giesen from the Technical University Dresden in Germany. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
00:01:50
Speaker
Thank you, Jose. Well, you've already said my name, Janet Bolcan. I am an associate professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Forestry, which is on the west coast of Canada.
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm also from Guyana on the north coast of South America, and that's where I have long-term collaborative research with both indigenous peoples,
00:02:14
Speaker
in forests and with local communities on the coast. have a long-term interest in youth role and I serve as coordinator of the Working Party 90307, which focuses on indigenous peoples and forest landscapes.
00:02:35
Speaker
So Lucas, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yes, of course, Jose. Thank you very much and hello everyone. My name is Lukas Giesen. I'm a professor and the chair in tropical and international forestry at TU Dresden, which is in Germany.
00:02:50
Speaker
And to be honest, also the cradle of systematic forestry sciences in the world. Not to say the oldest institution, which on paper might be St. Petersburg, but off the paper, it's us.
00:03:05
Speaker
In Eufro, I had been active in the past. I did coordinate different units within Division 9, including the research group 905. We have these digits, you know, um on forest policy and governance.
00:03:20
Speaker
Today, or since the last Eufro World Congress, I resorted back into one of the working parties coordinating them on AI methods in forest social sciences.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I'm currently coordinating this together with Dr. Tati Micheletti,
Importance of Social Sciences in Forestry
00:03:37
Speaker
originally from Brazil, who is currently sitting with me on the campus in Tarrant for postdoc phase.
00:03:46
Speaker
Thank you to both of you. I think your research areas already give us an idea of the broad range of topics covered by this division. With the overall theme of forest policy and economics, it spans from forest resources research to information and communication, from forest history to legal aspects, and from forest governance to forest sector analysis.
00:04:11
Speaker
And did you know that Division IX is the youngest of the Ayufro divisions? It was created in 2009, I think, when Division VI, Social Aspects of Forest and Forestry, was split up to reflect the growing role of social sciences in Ayufro.
00:04:26
Speaker
So, Janette Lukas, can you tell us why the role of social sciences in forest research has become so important in your view? I think there are a number of interrelated reasons why social sciences in forest research has become so important.
00:04:42
Speaker
I think firstly ah because of the insistence of social scientists that researchers who are reporting on issues to do with forests or any aspect of our human societies should state their positionality.
00:05:00
Speaker
Whom do
Interconnection of Forests and Human Behavior
00:05:01
Speaker
they represent? Whose interests are being served? And I think this allows the consumer, the whether it's it's a student or the general public, to begin to understand what views they are hearing ah and from whose point of view.
00:05:20
Speaker
They can cut through this flood of information that they receive and get a good sense of how do I understand what is being said to me?
00:05:32
Speaker
How can I interpret it? And I think what social scientists insist on as well is what is the scientist's conceptual framework?
00:05:43
Speaker
How are they interpreting the data they are presenting? That data could be, for example, on ah the new interest or the growing interest in ah sequestering or or or um forest carbon, on storing forest carbon in trees and paying local communities and indigenous peoples to store them. How do they understand from the points of view of the advocates. Who is promoting the scheme? Is it the national government? Is this a resource grab?
00:06:14
Speaker
Are Indigenous peoples or the local community, are their rights being represented? This is the role of social scientists. Well, I would take you back into a quote of a, let's call him famous international forester.
00:06:30
Speaker
According to the famous quote by Jack Westerby, forestry is not about trees, it's about people. And it is only about trees in so far as they can serve the needs of people.
00:06:44
Speaker
So from that we see that since ages, almost all forest-related issues are about forests who behave, who act, so who are actors in and around forests.
00:07:00
Speaker
So these people are actors then following certain regularities, certain patterns in their behavior and a little bit like electrons do on the outer crust of an atom.
00:07:12
Speaker
Just not predictable in 100% of cases, like in the natural laws, but maybe 60% of cases or 75% of cases, they behave in regular patterns.
00:07:24
Speaker
they behave in regular peants So this leads us a little bit to a dichotomy of natural sciences and social sciences perspectives, where over the past centuries humankind was very good at producing a lot of natural science findings.
00:07:42
Speaker
Some might have thought, now we know everything, now we know the truth, hence people will act accordingly and logically. yeah But this view is a little bit flawed and we all seem to know this.
00:07:55
Speaker
People
Indigenous Forest Rights & Cultural Connections
00:07:56
Speaker
behave according to their self-interests and not so much about only truth. So the role of social sciences now, after we hold so much natural science, truth, ah knowledge,
00:08:10
Speaker
is to bridge the gap for making our wealth of fundamental knowledge also work in real life contexts, maybe even with real people.
00:08:21
Speaker
Thanks for this clarification, Janet. um Lucas, let us now go deeper into the matter. I wanted to ask Janet about your research related to indigenous people and what forest means to them, how they engage with forests and forest landscapes.
00:08:36
Speaker
At the climate conference in Brazil, we saw a large participation of indigenous peoples, you know, pledges that were made, but we also saw a heated protest. What does your research tell us about the relationship between indigenous peoples and forests?
00:08:52
Speaker
Not just in the Guyana Shield where I work, but globally, most of the forests of the world are claimed by national governments. It means that in practice, the rights of Indigenous peoples, their property rights, their tenured rights to forests, is often very weak or completely missing. Indigenous peoples who have the longest association with specific places, with their traditional ancestral territories often have the weakest legal rights to those areas. All the reports I've read about the COP30 in Belém is, again, this insistence of indigenous peoples from Brazil and elsewhere to say, we were here, these are our forests, we have inherent rights to these forests that have completely separate from what governments recognize.
00:09:46
Speaker
These forests are vital to our survival. as intact peoples. In these forests are not just our links to, you might say, the material world, the world of food and fuel, but also our cultural sense of who we are.
00:10:06
Speaker
Everything in this forest is named in our language. And so if we lose our forest, we are going to lose our language, our culture, our intrinsic sense of what we are as a distinct people. Thank you. Well, perhaps, Lukas, you can fill us in on the role of forest governance in this context and maybe give us also a brief introduction. I mean, you've already done so, but a bit more to your work in Ayufro, especially on what you're doing
Forest Governance & AI in Research
00:10:35
Speaker
in this new working party on the use of artificial intelligence in social research.
00:10:41
Speaker
Yes. Geta, thanks for your question. So I'm happy to fill you in as you ask ah on on the role of governance. and For this, I first have to go a little bit deeper, as you invited me.
00:10:54
Speaker
ah So governance, we can look at from two perspectives, either from an analytical value neutral perspective, which for me then makes institutions as rule systems, they can be formal or informal in nature, plus actors, they can be public or private actors in nature, and those two actors acting within institutional rule systems.
00:11:20
Speaker
They are leading to effects on forest ecosystems and forest social systems. The second perspective we can take on forest governance is a normative one. And many of you might have heard good forest governance or good governance ah somewhere.
00:11:36
Speaker
There is a lot of work out there with high relevance in practical context. However, I must say, this is a quite Western concept and perspective. ah Because if we call something good governance, we would automatically have to ask good for who?
00:11:52
Speaker
Thank you, Lukas. Let me repeat my question. but Maybe you could give us a brief introduction to your work in Iufro, as you did before already a little bit, and especially let us know more about what your plans are with your working party on the use of artificial intelligence in social research. Yes, Gerd, thanks a lot.
00:12:13
Speaker
Well, I would start in general terms. So engaging in Iufro isn't a wonderfully rewarding exercise ever since I was a young scientist. I'm 47 in age currently and I think I got engaged in the latter part of my PhD.
00:12:35
Speaker
um So I can only encourage young, striving, emerging researchers to reach out, to get engaged, to make proposals, to form own groups.
00:12:46
Speaker
And yes, also to push established boundaries and rules that you might have under the IUFRO board and all these structured regulations. Now, resorting back to that small but beautiful group or working party on artificial intelligence and social forest sciences,
00:13:05
Speaker
ah is really, well, speaking from my heart, is that the right English? If you do qualitative social science research, if you listen to people doing interviews ah during interviews, if you ask them for meaning and interpretation of certain things, how possibly could an AI detect that particular meaning?
00:13:33
Speaker
On the other side, we as individuals might bring a terrible bias to our qualitative research. I see big ah potential of AI helping us to increase our rigor, helping us to reflect on our own biases.
00:13:51
Speaker
And well, let's see if AI can do a good or even a better or a modest job in analyzing qualitative, not quantitative social science data.
00:14:03
Speaker
And so
Integrating Traditional Knowledge with Technology
00:14:04
Speaker
this ties in with the next question, which is, in your view, how can both the traditional and the high-tech approaches to knowledge contribute to forests and forest management today and in the future?
00:14:18
Speaker
So the high-tech approach is marvelous because then we get this immense amount of data, big data on LIDAR, for example. What does social science bring to that discussion? Well, what it brings is the ground-truthing and the triangulation to that big data.
00:14:41
Speaker
And so, for example, you can't understand or interpret fire on the landscape without understanding the history of that, you know, that is now expressed in that fire.
00:14:54
Speaker
So, for example, in British Columbia, where I now work, then in Western Canada, More and more, both natural scientists and social scientists recognize that when Europeans came to the New World, they brought with them their understandings of fire on the landscape, on forests.
00:15:20
Speaker
And on the West Coast, where indigenous people, where these were fire adapted forests and where indigenous peoples were accustomed to burning these forests lowly,
00:15:31
Speaker
low-intensity burns regularly, these were suppressed for over 100 years. And now the accumulation of debris on the forest floor plus global heating has meant that what we have are mega fires in both the United States and Canada. And so bringing social scientists to an understanding of fire means that governments now are working with tribal nations in the US, as they are called, with First Nations in British Columbia, to understand the play the role of cultural burning.
00:16:12
Speaker
This is most exciting
Division 9's Global Impact & Future Outlook
00:16:14
Speaker
really and also I think extremely valuable and also at the heart of what our youth is doing to bring together all this knowledge, be it scientific knowledge, traditional knowledge as a sound knowledge base for sound decision making. Because as you're saying, we're all in this together, but some are weaker, some are stronger as we define it. But I think we're facing the same problems worldwide. And I think this is exactly what Division 9 is bringing to the table as well, looking into what policymakers and what economy can contribute on a global basis. Are there any areas in Division 9 that you would particularly highlight also that that are so important for for people who specifically depend on forests and trees for their livelihoods? What we try to do in Division 9 is to compile the scientific analytical approach framed towards different current topics. and fields of research. So this is stretching from information and communication over economic sector analysis, over forest history, over forest resource economics, over forest policy and governance analysis to forest law and environmental legislation.
00:17:29
Speaker
So this is an extremely rich um and striving field, I must say. Also being the editor of one of the journals leading in that field, I can, well, confirm that this is an extremely growing field, growing in size, growing in interest, growing in importance, but also growing in rigor.
00:17:51
Speaker
And this this makes me very happy. I think, as you said, Division IX, which is the social, is so all-encompassing and interconnected. And here I can give a shout-out to Stephen Wyatt, who is the overall coordinator. He does a marvelous job of trying to have quarterly meetings. So ah this last year with Ida Wallen and Todora Rohelia, a number of us worked on webinars for the gender group. and had one publication in tropical forest issues ah out of the Netherlands on, and this one was as women as stewards of environmental and social transformations in tropical forests. This had been really a well received publication, encompassing lots of, you know, voices of women.
00:18:41
Speaker
in Africa, Asia, Latin America. So I think that kind of marvelous output is good for, you know, easily accessible research, culturally appropriate, you know, available for download. I use some of that in my classes. So just allowing many members, there's many working parties to come together. Another kind of ah out of this research and cross-cutting research is That by John Parota and Doris Muta, who are now putting together a special issue of trees, forests and people. Super interesting to see the work that, you know, how branches out, like this podcast, you know, it branches out to different parts of the world, to different disciplines.
00:19:30
Speaker
And you probably already know that a Youth for Work Congress in 2029 will take place in Nairobi, Kenya. and it's going to be the first one in the African continent.
00:19:41
Speaker
um Do you have any outputs from Division 9 that you will likely present there? Well, the first output, you call it output, the first output is people come, people travel, people find the means, the time, the reasons to travel, to move themselves, to motivate themselves, to organize themselves.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yes, and to ask their superiors for funding. um And to travel to beautiful Kenya, I must say. My son lives there currently doing his um volunteer work after his high school degree. He loves it.
00:20:16
Speaker
It's a lovely country, a lovely culture, very welcoming, good facilities in Nairobi. So this will be a big pleasure if people make the effort and if people manage to safeguard, to mobilize the resources.
00:20:34
Speaker
The second output, despite people coming, meeting, learning to like and to love each other, is that from these meetings should come certain ideas for joint articles, for joint conferences, for smaller workshops, for more engaging workshops. think that outpouring of commitment by indigenous peoples and local communities to the conference of parties in Belém, in Brazil, that what we will see from the Division nine in Nairobi is again that we are good allies.
00:21:07
Speaker
We are at the table with our research, but we're also here as collaborators, partners of Indigenous peoples from Africa, elsewhere, who have a story to tell, who have knowledge to impart. We can open, that space is available and open and listened to by all the policymakers gathered there and all the research scientists. I hope that we can gather as many
IUFRO World Congress & Division 9's Contributions
00:21:35
Speaker
actors and stakeholders as possible. One last thing before we finish. It has to do with, you know, for people who are interested on the division's work, how could this interested researchers contribute Division 9?
00:21:49
Speaker
Are there any entry points, any upcoming events or activities that they can look forward to? So there are a few, there are at least two webinars which are in the planning stage.
00:22:02
Speaker
One um which is being organized out at the University of the Philippines, at as luspanos where ah Deputy Coordinator Adrian Albano from the division I am in which is Indigenous Peoples and Forest Landscapes. Well, yes, of course, of course. But a Euphro is always about people?
00:22:24
Speaker
and euphro you do through people. So the best thing people who want to engage can do is to contact people, for example the coordinators of a unit to get involved and then travel to their meetings, travel to their workshops, travel to those conferences conference sessions or participate virtually, which is also very easily possible nowadays.
00:22:51
Speaker
We do have a number of conferences, yes, a lot of them regularly based in Europe. Unfortunately, I should say, but with Professor Liu and Renin University, we just organized ah large conference in China, ah making it easier for, let's say, some Asians to participate.
00:23:15
Speaker
um We will hold the International Forest Policy Meeting as a biannual English language conference in Prague in the Prague University of Life Sciences next May, May 2026, IFPM 6. Excellent. Thank you very much.
Concluding Messages & Key Takeaways
00:23:33
Speaker
And before we go, I always ask for like a short, very crispy takeaway message. What would be your takeaway message?
00:23:41
Speaker
My takeaway message would be that There is no more urgent time than now for organizations like Euphro, social scientists and the natural scientists like myself and that looks to how do we work to our work. um communicating that to policymakers in culturally appropriate languages, not just the major languages, that we then get out to policymakers and all constituency groups, that would be a big contribution, which our division is hoping to work on as well.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yes, I think for me, what was what is eye-opening over my last 20, 21 years in research is... that we look at a set of forest sciences in plural, ah that this set is very multidisciplinary, stemming from natural sciences, technical sciences, and yes, also those social sciences.
00:24:46
Speaker
Gerda, you have takeaway message for us? First of all, thank you, Lukas and Jeanette, for sharing your insights and for and and for this wonderful experience um of this podcast.
00:24:58
Speaker
I mean, what I've learned here is is about the importance of recognizing the social dimension of forests and ah the importance of social sciences also ah in combination with and in support of the natural forest.
00:25:13
Speaker
sciences. are They are truly complementary in that sense. And thank you also for for highlighting um the vibrancy of the UFO network and how important it is to have a network of people, with people, for people and to get in touch through people. I liked that a lot. Excellent. Thank you very much for taking part of the podcast. I hope that you liked it.
00:25:39
Speaker
Thank you to our listeners. We are at the end of this season, so look out for the next season where we will plan to cover the interdisciplinary work of AYUFRO on the task forces. And if you want to know more about AYUFRO, follow us on social media or click on the link on the show notes.
00:25:56
Speaker
Goodbye.