Public awareness of aesthetic and other forest values associated with sustainable forest management: A cross-cultural comparison among the public in four countries Sang Seop Lim a, * , John L. Innes b , Michael Meitner b a Korea Forest Service,139 Seonsa Road, Dunsan-Dong, Seo-Gu, Daejeon 302-701, Republic of Korea b Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, 2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4, Canada article info Article history: Received 6 August 2014 Received in revised form 17 November 2014 Accepted 25 November 2014 Available online Keywords: Public awareness Forest aesthetic indicator Cross-cultural comparison Social forest value Sustainable forest management abstract Korea, China, Japan and Canada are all members of the Montreal Process (MP). However, there has been little comparative research on the public awareness of forest values within the framework of Sustainable Forest Management, not only between Asia and Canada, but also among these three Asian countries. This is true of aesthetic values, especially as the MP framework has no indicator for aesthetic values. We conducted surveys to identify similarities and differences in the perceptions of various forest values, including aesthetic values, between residents of the four countries: university student groups in Korea, China, Japan and Canada, as well as a more detailed assessment of the attitudes of Koreans by including two additional groups, Korean office workers, and Koreans living in Canada. A multivariate analysis of variance test across the four university student groups revealed significant differences in the rating of six forest functions out of 31. However the same test across the three Korean groups indicated no significant differences indicating higher confidence in the generalizability of our university student comparisons. For the forest aesthetic values, an analysis of variance test showed no significant differences across all groups. The forest aesthetic value was rated 6.95 to 7.98 (out of 10.0) depending on the group and rated relatively highly among ten social values across all the groups. Thurstone scale rankings and relative distances of six major forest values indicated that climate change control was ranked as the highest priority and scenic beauty was ranked the lowest by all the groups. Comparison tests of the frequencies of preferred major forest values revealed no significant differences across the groups with the exception of the Japanese group. These results suggest that public awareness of aesthetic and other forest values are not clearly correlated with the cultural backgrounds of the individuals, and the Korean university students' awareness could potentially be representative of the Koreans general public's opinion. We expect this research to contribute to the development of aesthetic and social indicators, and to the enhancement of balancing social with environmental and economic values within the SFM framework. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) should balance envi- ronmental, economic and social values (Ferretti, 1997; McDonald and Lane, 2004; Toman and Ashton, 1996), yet many international SFM frameworks have been criticized for the lack of social and aesthetic criteria and indicators (C&I) (Gough et al., 2008; MCPFE, 2003; Meitner et al., 2006; MP, 2009; Sheppard et al., 2004). A lack of substantive public input to the development of the indicators may be responsible for this omission (Lewis, 2005; Sheppard and Achiam, 2004), so it is important to understand the public's awareness of forest values when developing C&I of SFM that incorporate public values and participation (Bengston, 1994; Hunt and Haider, 2001; Sheppard et al., 2006). To date, there have been many studies involving cross-cultural comparisons of forest aesthetics and scenic beauty. These studies have revealed potential differences in the ratings of landscape preferences between Western Australian and American students (Kaplan and Herbert, 1987), between Italian and Australian uni- versity students (Purcell et al., 1994), and between Yugoslavians, West Indians and Americans (Zube and Pitt, 1981). The results of these studies support the notion that public perception of scenic * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ82 4814210; fax: þ82 4814173. E-mail address: sangseoplim@gmail.com (S.S. Lim). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Environmental Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jenvman http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.11.026 0301-4797/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Environmental Management 150 (2015) 243e249