A growing body of literature argues that subjective factors can more accurately explain individual adaptation to climate change than objective measurers of adaptive capacity. Recent studies have shown that personal belief in climate change and affect are much better in explaining climate awareness and action than income, education or gender. This study focuses on the process of individual adaptation to climate change. It assesses and compares the influence of cognitive, experiential and structural factors on individuals' views and intentions regarding climate change adaptation. Data from this study comes from a survey with 836 forest owners in Sweden. Ordinal and binary logistic regression was used to test hypotheses about the different factors. Results show that cognitive factors-namely personal level of trust in climate science, belief in the salience of climate change and risk assessment-are the only statistically significant factors that can directly explain individuals' intention to adapt to climate change and their sense of urgency. Findings also suggest that structural or socio-demographic factors do not have a statistically significant influence on adaptation decision-making among Swedish forest owners. The study also offers valuable insights for communication interventions to promote adaptation. Findings strongly suggest that communication interventions should focus more strongly on building trust and addressing stakeholders' individual needs and experiences.

Changes in forest land use and management arise from the decisions of individual forest owners. To gain a better understanding of forest owner decision-making and its implications for forest land-use change, we develop a forest owner functional typology based on a meta-analysis of quantitative and qualitative information about forest owners and their decision-making strategies across the developed world. From this typology, we develop an index of forest owner sustainability. We find nine broad forest owner functional types: industrial productionist, non-industrial productionist, for-profit recreationist, for-profit multi-objective, non-profit multiobjective, recreationalist, species conservationist, ecosystem conservationist and passive owner. These owner types align along three gradients representing (1) their economic focus, (2) the intensity of their management practices and (3) the type of goods and services they provide (private vs. public). We also find that multi-objective and conservationist owners generally practise the most sustainable forms of forest management and industrial productionists the least sustainable in terms of triple bottom line sustainability. Supracontinental land owner typologies of this kind can be useful in assisting international policy making and in developing resource management programmes. We suggest that future studies should investigate forest owner typologies in the developing world, forest owner information-sharing networks, and the ways in which forest owners learn and adapt to environmental change.

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Adaptation is necessary to cope with or take advantage of the effects of climate change on socio-ecological systems. This is especially important in the forestry sector, which is sensitive to the ecological and economic impacts of climate change, and where the adaptive decisions of owners play out over long periods of time. Relatively little is known about how successful these decisions are likely to be in meeting demands for ecosystem services in an uncertain future. We explore adaptation to global change in the forestry sector using CRAFTY-Sweden; an agent-based model that represents large-scale land-use dynamics, based on the demand and supply of ecosystem services. Future impacts and adaptation within the Swedish forestry sector were simulated for scenarios of socio-economic change (Shared Socio-economic Pathways) and climatic change (Representative Concentration Pathways, for three climate models), between 2010 and 2100. Substantial differences were found in the competitiveness and coping ability of land owners implementing different management strategies through time. Generally, multi-objective management was found to provide the best basis for adaptation. Across large regions, however, a combination of management strategies was better at meeting ecosystem service demands. Results also show that adaptive capacity evolves through time in response to external (global) drivers and interactions between individual actors. This suggests that process-based models are more appropriate for the study of autonomous adaptation and future adaptive and coping capacities than models based on indicators, discrete time snapshots or exogenous proxies. Nevertheless, a combination of planned and autonomous adaptation by institutions and forest owners is likely to be more successful than either group acting alone.

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