Towards sustainable forest management strategies with MOEAs

Sustainable forest management is a crucial element in combating climate change, plastic pollution, and other unsolved challenges of the 21st century. Forests not only produce wood - a renewable resource that is increasingly replacing fossil-based materials - but also preserve biodiversity and store massive amounts of carbon. Thus, a truly optimal forest policy has to balance profit-oriented logging with ecological and societal interests, and should thus be solved as a multi-objective optimization problem. Economic forest research, however, has largely focused on profit maximization. Recent publications still scalarize the problem a priori by assigning weights to objectives. In this paper, we formulate a multi-objective forest management problem where profit, carbon storage, and biodiversity are maximized. We obtain Pareto-efficient forest management strategies by utilizing three state-of-the-art Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs), and by incorporating domain-specific knowledge through customized evolutionary operators. An analysis of Pareto-efficient strategies and their harvesting schedules in the design space clearly shows the benefits of the proposed approach. Unlike many EMO application studies, we demonstrate how a systematic post-optimality trade-off analysis can be applied to choose a single preferred solution. Our pioneering work on sustainable forest management explores an entirely new application area for MOEAs with great societal impact.