Optimizing forest land management under overlapping multiple resource tenures

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The problems facing forest companies have become significantly more complex for several reasons: (1) management for environmental resources involves impacts on processes with varying time and spatial scales; (2) protection and enhancement of many environmental values require optimization of spatial configurations hence involving very large problems; (3) the management for multiple values involves more complex sets of constraints and objectives; and (4) lack of information (e.g. lack of precise data) and knowledge (e.g. uncertainty with respect to long term biological impacts) increase the importance of treating risk and uncertainty explicitly. In addition to facing complex choices of silvicultural strategies, many forest companies must cope with interference in their forest arrangement from "overlapping" tenure holders which have rights to exploit other resources on the same forest. The objective of our research program is to develop models that will assist both industry and government to find optimal management strategies that take explicit account of the institutional arrangements that regulate forest operations. We plan to develop more efficient algorithms to identify optimal spatial assignment of land use activities using new institutional designs (e.g. zoning). We also plan on refining these models to include the potential impacts of significant natural processes (fire, succession). An important issue facing many forest companies is the issue of overlapping tenures. Governments often provide the rights of using different resources on forest lands to different companies. For example, different companies are assigned rights to different resources (e.g. forestry and oil and gas). The exploitation of different resources on the same land by different companies can lead to conflict and significant waste if done without coordination. We plan to model the decisions facing forest companies under different overlapping tenure regimes and explore a variety of cooperative joint planning options. We will consider a variety of alternative distributional mechanisms (cost-sharing mechanisms) to identify a fair distribution of payoffs and costs among the tenure holders. The models will be tested through a sequence of case studies in Ontario, BC and Alberta.