Climate Risks, Forest Ecologies, and Human Communities: Justice Matters

Forests play a key role in combating climate change. They sequester carbon (absorb about 30% of global GHG emissions), affect the local climate, and support millions of people. However, current anthropogenic global warming has led to large-scale changes in forests worldwide that differentially affect populations in diverse locations. Moreover, forest programs and climate policies typically frame forests as a technical problem, ignoring key concerns of who gains, who loses, and who decides. This session, employing an Environmental Justice (EJ) lens, calls for conceptual and empirical papers that examine the ways the climate crisis is transforming justice in forest locations. The EJ paradigm requires fairness in three domains: 1) distributive justice: who suffers harms and who reaps benefits from the environment, 2) procedural justice: who participates in decisions, and 3) recognition justice: whose knowledge and perspectives are valued.

We welcome submissions on broad environmental concerns about the impacts of climate hazards on forest ecosystems and surrounding human communities, as well as on specific governance concerns about how forest policies disproportionately affect forest-dependent rural, coastal, and indigenous peoples worldwide. This session asks: How do climate risks alter lives and livelihoods in and around forests? How do conservation and adaptation initiatives affect access to land, water, and forest resources? Who is excluded from planning and policy discussions? How may climate initiatives be brought into discussion with social and environmental justice and incorporate local knowledge and customs, such that the outcomes are equitable in the new climate regime?