Studying the future of the forest sector: Review and implications for long-term outlook studies

Outlook studies have long traditions in the forest sector – they have been conducted regularly since the 1950s. Until very recently, the approaches used in these studies have remained relatively unchanged. However, the global forest sector has been faced with major structural changes and its operating environment has become ever more complex and interlinked with other sectors. The aim of this article is to review the forest sector outlook approaches in face of these changes, and to analyze how well they have been able to capture and project the changes. Moreover, we raise the question of whether they seem informative enough for the purposes of today's decision makers and other stakeholders. The results indicate that the existing outlook studies have not been able to sufficiently capture the structural changes in global paper markets, and it may be that they have difficulties in considering the possible structural changes in other markets as well. In order to assess the changes occurring in the operating environment more systematically, and to better meet the needs of policy-makers and stakeholders, there are potential advantages in complementing the current modeling approach dominant in the forest sector with other methods from the field of foresight.