Integrating ecosystem services and resilience in sustainable forest management

In the Anthropocene era, humanity has substantially shaped the ecosystems to meet the growing demand for provisioning ecosystem services (ES) but at the same time, it has considerably altered the functioning of the Earth system leading to completely novel and unpredictable effects. Resilience, ES and sustainability have gained tremendous popularity, over the last decades, in the scientific, policy and management arenas to address these challenges. However, less attention has been paid to the relationships between ES and resilience and how these concepts interact with sustainability. We, therefore, analyzed the concepts of ES and resilience, their relationships, strengths and weaknesses to determine how resilience and ES could be together operationalized for sustainable forest management.
This analysis is based on a literature review and on interviews with leading experts in the field of resilience and/or ES. These two sources of information are complementary as the scientific literature synthetizes a long thinking process while the interviews gather main thoughts and opinions.
The analysis shows that resilience and ES are closely intertwined in several ways. On one hand, resilience determines the capacity of an ecosystem to provide ES in the face of disturbances and is influenced, in turn, by human actions taken to response to changes in ES. On the other hand, resilience is defined as the ability to maintain ES. Resilience is sometimes even included in some ES classifications. Finally, these two concepts are applied together in forest management, for example to maintain a desired set of ES in the face of disturbances.
The resilience approach contributes to improve the ES approach and vice versa: the resilience approach introduces the temporal dimension in the ES approach while the ES approach helps integrating the multiple dimensions, scales, methods and points of views as well as their interactions in the resilience approach. Resilience may be mandatory to ES and vice versa as a loss of resilience/ES could jeopardize ES/resilience. In conclusion, pairing ES and resilience is essential to promote policies toward sustainable forest management. However, caution should be exercised to avoid traps of one concept overriding the other.