Social impacts of Finnish forest bioeconomy: discussion on usability of different tools

Context Any human activity causes social impacts and those can be both negative, as well as positive. The growing global awareness of social impacts creates a demand for their quantification (Macombe et al., 2013; Norris,... [ view full abstract ]

Context
Any human activity causes social impacts and those can be both negative, as well as positive. The growing global awareness of social impacts creates a demand for their quantification (Macombe et al., 2013; Norris, 2006). This is also true within the forest industry. However, different sectors can be very different by nature and that may cause difficulties in using standardised approaches and databases (Bocoum et al., 2015).

Objectives
Forest-based industries, and forestry itself, play an important role in Finnish bioeconomy. As a resources-intensive sector, forestry is often under the scrutiny for its impacts to the society. While some social impacts of forestry, and related industries, could be illustrated for example with the Social Hotspots Database (SHDB) (Benoit-Norris et al., 2012), the main social impacts (both negative and positive) are quite often local and difficult to quantify.

Methodology/approach
In the so-called FORBIO research project our aim is to assess environmental, economic and social sustainability as well as acceptability of climate-neutral and resource-efficient forest-based bioeconomy in Finland. As background information, harvesting of Finnish forests is currently below the forest growth so that cuttings could be increased without risking future cutting potential. However, more intensified forest biomass utilization may interfere e.g. with other uses of forests, which must be taken into account in comparative assessment.

In order to do so, different national level bioeconomy scenarios, and company level case studies, are developed are performed in the project. Various existing tools are used to assess the sustainability of wood procurement and it’s processing into products including new high value-added products such as wood-based chemicals.

Finally, different approaches to assess social (as well as environmental and economic) impacts of the forest-based bioeconomy are utilized. These involve, but are not limited to, the use of the SHDB, decision analysis as previously applied e.g. in Myllyviita et al. (2013), the Finnish environmentally extended input-output model ENVIMAT and comparative and quantitative methods for assessment of social impacts (Macombe (coord.), 2013)

Findings and contributions
We evaluate and compare the alternative approaches to measure social impacts of forest-based bioeconomy. We present the preliminary findings of, and preconditions for, such assessment. Moreover, we raise a discussion on social handprinting in Finnish forest-based bioeconomy. Such aspects as local employment or recreational function of forests are inherently connected to this sector and as recently identified by Alhola (2015), Finnish companies are interested in quantifying their handprints.