This Research Topic is part of a series. To view the other collections, please follow the links below:
Towards 2030: A Tropical Forests Perspective on Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action)Towards 2030: A Forest Ecophysiology Perspective on Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action)Towards 2030: A Fire and Forests Perspective on Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 13Building on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, billed by the UN as “An Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance.” The seventeen ambitious goals, which are intended to be reached by 2030, are conceived as integrated, indivisible, and as balancing the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. As a member of the SDGs Publishers Compact, Frontiers is committed to accelerating progress to achieve the goals.
The seventeen SDGs are organized around five core pillars:
• People: ending poverty and hunger and ensuring that all human beings can lead fulfilling lives in a healthy and dignified environment.
• Planet: protecting the environment while ensuring sustainable use and management of natural resources.
• Prosperity: ensuring environmentally sustainable economic growth, mutual prosperity, and decent work for all.
• Peace: building societies that are peaceful, just and inclusive, and in which human rights and gender equality are respected.
• Partnership: strengthening global solidarity to address inequalities within and between countries, by focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable.
This Research Topic will address SDG 13 Climate Action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, from a temperate and boreal forests perspective.
Boreal forests can exhibit impressive resilience to disturbance, thanks to high genetic variability of the few dominant tree species. However, temperature rise due to climate change is now predicted to be the most dramatic in boreal regions. As climate changes in these ecosystems exceed the patterns of the past, and other anthropogenic disturbances continue, this may be enough to drastically reduce the high resilience of these forests. Temperate forest resilience is heavily influenced by the fact that there is a high variety of dominant tree species. Challenges for the continuation of these forests include anthropogenic destruction and land clearing, and combined with climate change, also puts these valuable ecosystems in danger.
Contributions to this Research Topic are invited that explore all aspects of these forests that are related to:
• Adaptive management of temperate and boreal forests to mitigate climate change impacts
• Increasing the resilience of temperate and boreal forests to environmental disturbance caused by climate change
• Assisted and independent migration of temperate and boreal forest species
• Impacts of increasingly extreme climate events (e.g. drought, heat wave) on temperate and boreal forests
• Feedback mechanisms between climate warming and carbon emissions from increased forest fires and disturbances in temperate and boreal forests
• Using agroforestry to increase security of food production in temperate and boreal forests
• Adaptation of natural and planted forests to climate change and climatic extremes, in temperate and boreal ecosystems.