Influence of the geographical scope on the research foci of sustainable forest management: Insights from a content analysis

Individual approaches to sustainable forest management have to be operationalized according to the regionally specific environmental conditions and stakeholder requirements. Unique regional socio-economic conditions also significantly impact stakeholder requirements of globally acting forest sector companies. Therefore, forest-based sector decision makers have to be aware of regionally-specific and context sensitive sustainability concerns, when assessing and prioritizing sustainability issues. Sustainability research is considered to have a regional focus and a problem-driven perspective. Hence, research foci of scientific discussion on sustainable forest management can provide insight into regional differences and problems of sustainable forest management. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of 643 scientific abstracts in the context of sustainable forest management. We observed 16 different topic categories, out of which the topics of forest health and conservation and forest management practices represent the dominant foci. Furthermore, our results confirm a strong impact of geographic scope on the research foci. For example, the issues of climate change mitigation and adaptation are significantly more investigated in the Global North while social impacts of forest management are more researched in the Global South. Our findings suggest that decision makers should consider more than environmental issues when selecting corporate social responsibility activities or when making environmental policies. Otherwise, they can potentially overlook the impacts of forest management which are of high regional importance and intensively investigated by the scientific community.