Maintaining or building roads? An adaptive management approach for preserving forest multifunctionality

•Adaptive management for multifunctional forests.•Interdependencies in forest coupled systems.•Safe operating spaces for forest multifunctional management.•Viability theory for forest management. The sustainable management of forests is a critical global challenge that requires meeting human needs while also preserving forest ecosystems and the livelihoods they provide. To achieve this goal, forest management must encompass all goods and services provided by the forest, and increasingly, forests are being viewed as complex social-ecological systems that require adaptive and multifunctional management. One key aspect of sustainable and multifunctional forest management is the use of shared infrastructures, such as roads, to connect the capacity for production and multifunctional use. However, the provision of roads raises issues and dilemmas, particularly in contexts where different forest functions have conflicting objectives. Effective governance is essential to address these challenges. In this article, we propose a control problem framework with infinite horizon that integrates the role of roads and their governance into adaptive management. Our approach involves using a dynamical forest model that considers the roads related to forest functions as part of the mathematical viability theory problem. We distinguish between different scenarios of mono-functional and multifunctional forest management and examine the safe operating space of the exploited ecosystems for each scenario. Our results demonstrate the formalization of complex interactions within a multifunctional forest system and highlight how even small changes in infrastructure provision strategies can dramatically impact the safe operating space of the forest ecosystem. By incorporating shared infrastructures into adaptive forest management, we can ensure the sustainability of both the forest ecosystem and the human communities that depend on it.