The meaning of climate-smart forestry— A narrative literature review

Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) has gained prominence as a concept for addressing climate change in forestry, yet its meaning and application vary across the scientific literature. This paper examines how CSF is conceptualized through a PRISMA-guided systematic review combined with thematic narrative analysis of 32 scientific publications published between 2015 and 2025. The analysis identifies four recurring narrative clusters that structure how climate-related problems, actors, solutions, and future forest visions are articulated. Across these clusters, CSF emerges as a flexible, integrative concept anchored in mitigation and adaptation objectives but differentiated in terms of its treatment of forest management, governance, and the social dimension. Findings also reveal that policy and governance actors are consistently foregrounded, although local knowledge and differentiated actor roles receive limited attention. While social dimensions are more frequently referenced within CSF scholarship, distributional and power-related questions concerning how benefits, risks, responsibilities, and decision-making authority are allocated are rarely examined in depth. As the concept expands to incorporate biodiversity and broader sustainability objectives, a clearer articulation of trade-offs among mitigation, adaptation, production, and socio-economic goals becomes increasingly important. Making these recurring narrative configurations explicit helps clarify how CSF maintains coherence while accommodating divergent interpretations, with implications for more reflexive climate-oriented forest governance.