Divergent trends in ecosystem services under different climate-management futures in a fire-prone forest landscape

While ecosystem services and climate change are often examined independently, quantitative assessments integrating these fields are needed to inform future land management decisions. Using climate-informed state-and-transition simulations, we examined projected trends and trade-offs for a suite of ecosystem services under four climate change scenarios and two management scenarios (active management emphasizing fuel treatments and no management other than fire suppression) in a fire-prone landscape of dry and moist mixed-conifer forests in central Oregon, USA. Focal ecosystem services included fire potential (regulating service), timber volume (provisioning service), and potential wildlife habitat (supporting service). Projections without climate change suggested active management in dry mixed-conifer forests would create more open forest structures, reduce crown fire potential, and maintain timber stocks, while in moist mixed-conifer forests, active management would reduce crown fire potential but at the expense of timber stocks. When climate change was considered, however, trends in most ecosystem services changed substantially, with large increases in wildfire area predominating broad-scale trends in outputs, regardless of management approach (e.g., strong declines in timber stocks and habitat for closed-forest wildlife species). Active management still had an influence under a changing climate, but as a moderator of the strong climate-driven trends rather than being a principal driver of ecosystem service outputs. These results suggest projections of future ecosystem services that do not consider climate change may result in unrealistic expectations of benefits

Sustainable development in the Alps: the Mountaineering Villages (Bergsteigerd\uf6rfer) initiative

Mountain regions provide goods and services such as water, hydroelectricity, timber, biodiversity, recreation, etc. which are important not only to the local communities. International agreements and policy documents, namely the Alpine Convention, the Alpine Space programme, the European Union Strategy for the Alpine Region, and the 2030 Agenda, address these regions. The aim of this research is to investigate the potential of the Mountaineering Villages initiative, launched by the Austrian Alpine Association, to achieve the objective of sustainable development in the Alpine region in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2030 Agenda. For this purpose, an analysis was carried out to compare the Mountaineering Villages criteria and the SDGs. Results revealed that not only SDG15 and SDG6, which explicitly recognize the importance of mountains, but also other SDGs, in particular SDGs 4, 8, 9, 11 and 12, would be positively affected by the implementation of the MVs initiative. In fact, MVs are oriented towards the development of sustainable tourism, which means first and foremost safeguarding local natural and cultural values as unique and attractive elements, as well as the development of both mountaineering and tourism services, facilities and skills, thus promoting socioeconomic development of the area through the creation of jobs and the enhancement of local economies and communities