Beyond geopolitical challenges, ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, biomass for materials and energy production, and increasing demand for land are key questions. By generating new activities in response to ever-changing challenges, such forces can improve the capacity of societies to adapt. However, they can also reduce that capacity, notably by creating new specific threats to forestry sustainability.

Major challenges for sustainable forests

These specific challenges apply to three kind of fields:

• Areas primarily covered by natural or planted tropical and subtropical forests.
• The societies that make a living from forest and depend directly on them and on their transformed products.
• The economic and geopolitical evolutions, which influence public policies and instruments.

Among the specific challenges that exist all over the tropical world, R&D must focus on:

• Global changes and new demands represent both opportunities and threats for the sustainability of goods and services from forested ecosystems.
• Adaptations that managers and practitioners should apply to their practices in order to integrate these changes while not only safeguarding but improving the sustainability of forested ecosystems.
• New societal and environmental demands should provide solutions that contribute to the improvement of living conditions and to the decrease of vulnerability of local or neighbouring societies.

These topics can be reformulated into the two following meta-questions:

• How to facilitate the adaptation of ecological and social systems to the constraints and opportunities resulting from global change?
• How to boost the sustainability of the services provided by tropical forests for the benefit of societies, on a local and global scale?

An exceptional proximity between natural forests and dense agrosystems

In Southeast Asia, forestry students and professionals will also have to address specific challenges. Indeed, deforestation and interactions with tree crop plantations and other agricultural developments remains one of the hottest political topics in the region, calling for the diffusion among practitioners, of the best landscape management practices.

Agricultural and forestry landscapes are extremely fragmented and thus they form very complex mosaics, even in the largest remaining forest basins such as Borneo and the Papua Island. In the Islands of Java and Sumatra, in the Malaysian Peninsula and in Thailand and in Vietnam, the complexity of these mosaics reaches the highest levels in the world. This implies that many solutions and strategies developed and applied in other parts of the world will not be directly applicable in SE Asia. Some wrong decisions could even create ecological or economical disasters. These mosaics create an exceptional proximity between natural forest ecosystems and extremely dense agrosystems. This proximity was recently evidenced as the source of the emergence of zoonoses that can become global pandemics.

Besides, such landscape mosaics are associated with the persistence of unsustainable practices such as slash and burn management, which leads to catastrophes of geological scale when the fires reach the peatlands. The carbon emission processes are well known, mitigation approaches through circular economy and social negotiation exist, as well as precise methods to assess how carbon credits can help to make both agricultural and forestry practices more sustainable.

Dealing with the  colonial heritage

For historic reasons linked to colonial heritage, agriculture and forestry policies in SE Asia are still very diverse across countries and within countries. For the same reasons, many agribusiness corporations emerged, which all find their roots in the colonial plantation economies. As a result, in SE Asia more than elsewhere, the industrial and financial strategies are extremely impactful on the sustainability of forestry.

SE Asian downstream industries based on industrial plantations and forestry belong to agribusiness corporations and most of then follow very conservative industrial organisations that were designed more than a century ago. However new sustainable industrial paths emerge, and it has become crucial to train the managers of these industries to decipher what strategical choices can lead to improved sustainability.