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There is growing interest in widening public participation in research and practice in environmental decision making and an awareness of the importance of framing research questions that reflect the needs of policy and practice. The Top Ten Questions for Forestry (T10Q) project was undertaken in 2008 to investigate a process for compiling and prioritizing a meaningful set of research questions, which were considered by participating stakeholders to have high policy relevance, using a collaborative bottom-up approach involving professionals from a wide set of disciplines of relevance to modern forestry. Details are presented of the process, which involved an online survey and a workshop for participants in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Survey responses were received from 481 researchers, policy makers and woodland owners, who contributed 1594 research questions. These were debated and prioritized by 51 people attending the workshop. The project engaged people who were outside the traditional boundaries of the discipline, a trend likely to be more important in the future, particularly in the light of complex problems connected with climate change, bioenergy production or health and well-being, for example, which require multidisciplinary partnerships within the research and policy communities. The project demonstrated the potential for combining web-based methods and focussed group discussions to collect, debate and prioritize a large number of researchable questions considered of importance to a broad spectrum of people with an active interest in natural resource management.

The importance of natural environments to human health was generally accepted until the early 20th century, but subsequently has been neglected. Today that traditional understanding is being rediscovered, but is now conceptualised in the language of science. For contributions in this field to have an impact today, therefore, they must be communicated in the language of medical and public health science. Concepts of well-being are now seen to be central to, and have been adopted in, policies relating to social sustainability. The emergence of lifestyle as a focus for concern both in health and sustainability is leading to convergence in policy and in practice and to the development of shared language.

This paper focuses on the questions of governance and climatic change, including the different levels of governance, the practicalities of establishing robust and accountable systems and some risks of concentrating on a single issue. Important themes were communication and coordination, not only to ensure that decisions are made based on good information but also to overcome differences in language and meanings from a variety of international processes where each has its own particular vocabulary.