Abstract Forests are central to global mitigation strategies, yet efforts to advance forest‑based climate action remain contentious and slow. Mainstream assessments tend to focus on technical, economic, and institutional barriers but often overlook the political and normative dimensions of why progress stalls. This paper examines how forest and climate experts across different regions and sectors appraise challenges to forest-based climate mitigation, where they align or disagree, and which barriers are seen as most impactful and feasible to address. Using Group Concept Mapping, the study surfaces contestation over how challenges are framed and whose knowledge and interests are reflected in forest-climate decisions. Expert ratings show broad convergence around the importance of challenges related to finance, governance, Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights, and accounting for multiple forest values. Assessments diverged more on carbon accounting, offsetting, the power and influence of different actors and forest management approaches. Critically, the analysis reveals a core tension in forest-climate governance: barriers perceived as most consequential are seen as the least feasible to overcome, calling into question whether current governance systems are fit for purpose. Only a small set of challenges, mostly pertaining to epistemic governance issues, are viewed as both relatively impactful and feasible to tackle. These findings suggest that advancing forest-based mitigation will require addressing shared and tractable priorities in the near term, while confronting the deeper governance and political constraints that currently limit action on the most critical barriers.
Catalina Gonda (Sat,) studied this question.