Targeting climate change adaptation strategies to small-scale private forest owners

Climate change adaptation needs to receive extensive attention in the forestry sector. While measures are being applied in federal forests and large private properties, it remains unclear how small-scale private forest owners, with a property < 20 ha, perceive the possible influence of climate change and whether they will approach required activities. While in the past, the majority of private forest owners had ties to agriculture and cultivated farmland alongside their forests, recent studies revealed new trends and significant deviations from established norms and beliefs. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the motivations for forest ownership, current management practices, and perception of and adaptability to climate change, to discuss successful approaches for information campaigns, advisory services, and monetary incentives. The study applied a questionnaire with an embedded choice experiment, which obtained a thorough understanding of the salient factors influencing decision-making by surveying 919 forest owners across Austria. Results show that small-scale private forest owners are not homogenous. Three distinct segments were identified (utility oriented, recreation oriented, and tradition conscious forest owners) which reacted differently to provided management options and incentives. However, even under a worst-case scenario setting, 84% of forest owners would select some sort of management over no procedure, indicating that forest management is not generally rejected. Information campaigns should rather focus on soft management leading to attractive, stable and highly diverse forest stands resilient to climate change than on cost efficiency and financial benefits. Therefore, advisory services need to convey, that all forest measures are performed with special care and under consideration of the remaining forest and that each stand is treated individually with adequate equipment. Increasing monetary incentives, such as funding, barely influences forest owners' decision-making and are therefore deemed unfeasible and unable to motivate the owners to undertake climate change adaptation measures. The study shows that a segmentation based on management behavior and preferences rather than on predefined characteristics has the potential to define a new state of the art. Overall, climate change adaptation through tailored forest management is highly supported by the presented findings.