Paper short abstract:

While French forests are pointed out as the remedy for climate change mitigation, they suffer from repeated droughts, bioagressors and fires. We discuss how such tensions about the roles and future of French forests lead to both inertia or movement in multifonctionality's discourses and practices.

Paper long abstract:

French forests are now at the crossroads of multiple dynamics and expectations: while they are supposed to be managed to ensure their multifunctionality, they are pointed out as a major carbon sink by national policies, and as the remedy for climate change mitigation. Simultaneously, French forests are increasingly impacted by on-going climate change (droughts, bio-aggressors, fires), which alters their functioning and survival. In this context, how is the injunction to multifunctionality, at the heart of French forest policies, translated into practices at local level? To what scale is multifunctionality implemented and by whom (which forest manager’s profiles)? How is the discourse on multifunctionality used and distributed among forest actors?

First, through collective workshops and qualitative surveys in three French regional natural parks (Pyrénées ariégeoises, Luberon and Morvan), we shed light on the choices being currently made in an attempt to undo the current forests and create tomorrow’s forests. Second, within this multifunctionality framework, our study shows that (1) while the mitigation function is strongly mobilized in political discourse at regional and national scales, the ones of wood production and biodiversity protection are more so in practice, (2) mitigation discourse and policies (e.g. low-carbon strategies and the national forest renewal plan launched in 2020), however, reproduce and reinforce existing power dynamics in French forest management (institutional forests and forestry cooperatives vs citizen forest groups).

Our research highlights the continuities and discontinuities in both discourses, practices and coalitions regarding forest management in the face of the multifunctionality challenges.