Understanding synergies and tradeoffs between forests, water, and climate change

Abstract

Understanding synergies and trade‐offs between forests, water, and climate change is warranted for designing effective policies and strategies for managing water and forests, which are essential for sustenance, ecological proliferation, and economic development. Forests are considered global storehouse of resources, functioning as ecosystem service providers, such as recyclers of terrestrial water to maintain quality and quantity of water but are constantly regulated by climatic parameters. These interlinkages are further complicated by the highly debated role of forests in water regulation and consumption, anthropogenic changes in land use, changing climatic patterns and their subsequent impacts on the hydrological cycle. However, policy and planning for natural resource management seldom consider the interrelationships between forest, water, and climate change due to lack of consensus, misrepresentations and difficult conversions of the complicated interactions to policy. We review and discuss the existing research on these interrelationships with different approaches using a range of hydrological, climatic, and land use indicators. We further suggest incorporating long‐term data for forest, water, and climate into conceptual, statistical, and stochastic models may yield better projections with fewer uncertainties rather than those focusing on linear interactions between paired components. Thus, there is a need for exploring these interactions holistically rather than in silos from the perspective of natural resource management particularly in developing nations such as India that have a pressing need to develop new and synergize existing strategies for sustainable management of forest and water under changing climatic variables.