Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

As a forest owner you always have to consider hazards and uncertainty when planning your forestry actions. The aim with this report is to test my hypothesis that there is an overall difference between men and women when it comes to perception, estimation and management of hazards/risks in forestry. I will look into if there are differences in how men and women estimate risks in production forestry from an economical point of view. The aim is also to look into if there are differences between male and female private forest owners, in how they perceive and manage hazards in connection with a possible climate change.

To fulfil this aim, an inquiry survey was undertaken in three different areas of Sweden, two areas in the south and one in the north. But in this report I have evaluated the three areas as a whole.

Forest owners were for example asked to answer questions about the state of the forest, the owner structure, who makes the decisions, different things about climate change etc. They were also asked to classify different hazards according to what they thought were the most risky in different situations.

The results support my hypothesis that there is an overall difference between men and women when it comes to perception, estimation or handling with hazards in forestry. There were further statistical significant differences between men and women, but in the same cases there were also differences between those who lived at their forest estate and those who didn't. When it comes to these questions I can't prove that it is the difference in gender that is the dominating. On the rest of the questions I couldn't prove my hypothesis, because there were no statistically significant difference between men and women.

The questions where there were statistically significant differences between men and women differed a lot. It was for example questions about if they live on their estate or not, the size of the estate, if there is a climate change or not, why they have not thought about the climate change debate and how the climate change will affect the forest economy. There were also differences in the questions where they should classify the economical importance of different risks. For example which risk that had led to the highest costs during the last five years, the hazard where there is the highest risk for the forest estate economy and the hazard they were ready to pay the most money for to reduce the risk in the future.