This session will confront, and try to reconcile, a variety of trends and perspectives on possible forest futures in 2050, from various – often conflicting – angles and demands that fall on the forest sector, such as climate, carbon, biodiversity, wood and materials production for the bioeconomy, food security (including liberation of land to farming), income generation etc.

The session will highlight key macro trends and perspectives impinging on forests since 2000, with the aim to identify how they can be curved and reconciled by mid-century, towards some desirable, consistent future. Each of such perspective, projected into the future, often leads to particular scenarios: can these scenarios be confronted? What is desirable and what is undesirable when we look into the state of forests in 2050? Can we envisage a coherent – and desirable – future in 2050, looking at all these perspectives altogether? How to build one consistency space, across a range of different expectations and narratives: are their synergies or will difficult choices have to be made between priorities? What does it take between now and 2020 to enable such a future, accounting (and leveraging) the diversity of forestry contexts at landscape, regional and global levels, different forest biomes, different, multiple outputs and ecosystems services from forests, different management intensities from intact forests to planted forests, different management systems from sylviculture to agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, etc. 

This session will feature flash talks from a set of experts presenting about forests trajectories from 2000 and futures into 2050, each from a specific perspective, followed by a panel debate – and interaction with the room – on how these futures can be reconciled, with the aim to inform long term choices, orientations and decisions about forest policies and their integration into cross-sectoral sustainable development effort by 2050.