TRIBUNE – Faced with environmental and climatic challenges, the forest-timber sector is mobilizing, in New Aquitaine and in France, to reconcile societal utility, responsible management and adaptation to ecological emergencies.
The future is not what will happen to us, but what we will do with it. We have already started, within the French forestry sector, to follow this Bergsonian reasoning, aware of the societal issues and our fundamental role in initiating collective responses. We see the emergence of increasingly targeted actions from society against the players in our sector, and understand – certainly – all the expectations that each citizen, wherever they are, invests in us to translate them into action and in commitments.
Useful in essence
All the players in the professions ranging from family forestry to various users of wood and other bio-sourced materials, including artisanal and industrial processors, have collectively agreed within a common approach. That of being a useful sector in essence. Useful to meet the needs of our fellow citizens (housing, heating, transport, etc.) by adapting uses to resources, within the framework of the bioeconomy.
Useful for protecting and regenerating living things, the source of our matter as well as preserving a global ecosystem. Useful above all to face the challenges linked to climate change, by being the best solution for growth generating as little carbon as possible, at the same time as guaranteeing the capture, then the sequestration of this same carbon from our globalized society.
Injunctions to accelerate
This approach to accountability comes from our own desire to act, recognizing that the increasingly pressing injunctions of a section of society force us to accelerate the implementation of solutions. These solutions will be linked to the deployment of good practices, as well as the affirmation of commitments validated by the analysis of objective indicators, which will make it possible to build performance methodologies, at the scale of the nation as well as that of the each territory.
Proximity and concern for territorial responsiveness are one of the guarantees of success of this social responsibility approach. Involving constructive stakeholders, aware of the issues, and at the same time planning adaptation, is the other key to success.
How does this work? Thanks to a distribution of each person's roles, within an inter-professional organization which has affirmed a desire to move forward in cohesion, around issues of societal utility, attractiveness and the prescription of the uses of wood products. It is essential not to stop at how to cut down trees, but to understand the urgency of adapting forests in the face of entire territories that are withering away. Territories which are both the first victims of global warming and an important part of the solution.
It is essential to conserve the diversity of silvicultural species. This is why it is necessary to find valuable uses for the trees to be exploited to allow the regeneration of the forest. This must continue to associate good human management practices with natural cycles, to better cope with environmental and economic realities.
We must find valuable uses for the trees to be exploited to allow the regeneration of the forest.
Issues common to the general interest
These are all the issues that we find in the territories of our country: from pastoral regions to urban spaces, actors of consumption choices.
These are all issues that require dialogue, consultation and collective actions, coordinated within each forest massif.
These are all issues that must be addressed with the population, by the forestry sector brought together in territorial inter-professional organizations as well as at the national level.
The Fibois network, which acts at the scale of each French administrative region, proves every day its role in the establishment of a method allowing the appropriation of professional actors, the deployment in consultation with each citizen, and the monitoring commitments in an observatory, analysis and restitution role.
Fibois Nouvelle-Aquitaine was able to demonstrate this perfect collective harmony in the face of the emergency and the invectives, by allowing everyone to listen to each other, to propose and to organize themselves, during the Forest and Wood Conference in Limousin, on October 24, in the heart of Corrèze.
The coming months will be essential to gain the consent of all stakeholders, whether they are at the heart of the sector, or simply concerned by our common future. The general interest is at stake. And our sector will then show all its usefulness.
