Summary of the Forests and Water Workshop

Forest-Water Interactions

Forests account for 33% of land area, process nearly two-thirds of the fresh water supply, and provide water to about 180 million people in the United States. However, few forests are managed primarily for water; instead water quantity and quality are byproducts of other forest management objectives, such as timber production, recreation,

2018

Chapter published in Forest and Water on a Changing Planet: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Governance Opportunities. A Global Assessment Report.

Asian Journal of Research in Agriculture and Forestry, 2019

Sustaining a resilient and reliable water cycle is a global challenge, which inevitably needs proper understanding and action at many levels. One quarter of the world’s population depends on water from forested catchments, where behavior of atmospheric water nonetheless governs the forest-water interactions and thus the ultimate water availability. As per a coarse estimation the water vapors comprise one quarter of 1% of atmospheric mass being equivalent to just 2.5 centimeters of liquid water over the entire Earth. Such water availability raises more tangible concerns for most people than do temperature and carbon. Ever escalating populations and living standards are badly impacting the earth’s surface in variety of ways, as 1.5 million Km2 of dense tree cover were reported to be lost between 2000-2012, leading to highly impeded access to fresh water. Majority of studies of how forest land use and its change influences climate and hydrology rely on models (mostly imperfect owing t...

Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2013

2015

The importance of the relationship between water and forests is increasingly recognised, not only in the scientific world but also in policy discussions. However education and capacitybuilding across disciplines is necessary in order to address this problem. The objective of this paper is to structure and synthesise a part of the existing knowledge about the interactions between water and forests.

Trees have been around for more than 370 million years, and today there are about 80 thousand species of them, occupying 3.5 billion hectares worldwide, including 250 million ha of commercial plantations. While forests can provide tremendous environmental, social, and economic benefits to nations, they also affect the hydrologic cycle in different ways. As the demand for water grows and local precipitation patterns change due to global warming, plantation forestry has encountered an increasing number of water-related conflicts worldwide. This document provides a country-by-country summary of the current state of knowledge on the relationship between forest management and water resources. Based on available research publications, the Editor-in-Chief of this document contacted local scientists from countries where the impact of forest management on water resources is an issue, inviting them to submit a chapter.

2018

This chapter addresses potential forest and water management strategies based on our understanding of the ‘new normal’, the challenges imposed, in particular, by climate change and human population growth, and our evolving knowledge of forest-water interactions. It further considers forest and water management strategies when water is prioritised over other forest-related goals (such as biomass accumulation or the sequestration of carbon in standing forests). Explicitly prioritising water in forest management attempts to reset our priorities toward more sustainable strategies for long-term forest health and human welfare. This reordering of priorities does not necessarily compromise other forest-related goals but provides a much-needed emphasis on water as a key contribution to both planetary and human health.