Climate change is affecting Canada’s boreal zone, which includes most of the country’s managed forests. The impacts of climate change in this zone are expected to be pervasive and will require adaptation of Canada’s forest management system. This paper reviews potential climate change adaptation actions and strategies for the forest management system, considering current and projected climate change impacts and their related vulnerabilities. These impacts and vulnerabilities include regional increases in disturbance rates, regional changes in forest productivity, increased variability in timber supply, decreased socioeconomic resilience, and increased severity of safety and health issues for forest communities. Potential climate change adaptation actions of the forest management system are categorized as those that reduce nonclimatic stressors, those that reduce sensitivity to climate change, or those that maintain or enhance adaptive capacity in the biophysical and human subsystems of the forest management system. Efficient adaptation of the forest management system will revolve around the inclusion of risk management in planning processes, the selection of robust, diversified, and no-regret adaptation actions, and the adoption of an adaptive management framework. Monitoring is highlighted as a no-regret action that is central to the implementation of adaptive forest management.

The idea that humans can assist nature by purposely moving species to suitable habitats to fill the gap between their migration capability and the expected rate of climate change is being increasingly contemplated and debated as an adaptive management option. The interest in assisted migration, both in the scientific community and society at large, is growing rapidly and is starting to be translated into action in Canada. However, the concept is in its infancy; clear terminology has not yet been established and assisted migration still encompasses a broad range of practices. This introductory paper for the special issue of The Forestry Chronicle on the subject of assisted migration describes increasing interest in the subject and its complexity. It also provides an overview of the potential scale of assisted migration, proposes a terminology, and briefly introduces the following papers. Overall, the five papers aim to present a comprehensive state of the scientific and operational knowledge and the debate on assisted migration in the context of Canada's forests.