Strategic planning: methods and practice
Subject overview
For sustainable forestry development, long term vision is needed in order to take account of the future effect on forestry of gradual trends in economic, social and ecological factors. This digest covers general concepts and methodologies in strategic planning. Planning for long term forestry programmes needs to apply such methods and take account of the findings of existing global, regional and national studies in order to be "future proof"
Subject scope
Given the uncertainty of the future, one way to model possible future conditions is through the use of scenarios, which describe alternative outcomes based on the relative influence of current and likely future influences or change drivers. Some resources here give an introduction to scenario planning and other describe its application in forestry. Major global and regional sectoral analyses have been carried out in recent years using such techniques. These have usually been termed forestry sector outlook studies.