BoreaRL: A Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Environment for Climate-Adaptive Boreal Forest Management

Abstract

Boreal forests store 30-40\% of terrestrial carbon, much in climate-vulnerable permafrost soils, making their management critical for climate mitigation. However, optimizing forest management for both carbon sequestration and permafrost preservation presents complex trade-offs that current tools cannot adequately address. We introduce BoreaRL, the first multi-objective reinforcement learning environment for climate-adaptive boreal forest management, featuring a physically-grounded simulator of coupled energy, carbon, and water fluxes. BoreaRL supports two training paradigms: site-specific mode for controlled studies and generalist mode for learning robust policies under environmental stochasticity. Through evaluation of multi-objective RL algorithms, we reveal a fundamental asymmetry in learning difficulty: carbon objectives are significantly easier to optimize than thaw (permafrost preservation) objectives, with thaw-focused policies showing minimal learning progress across both paradigms. In generalist settings, standard gradient-descent based preference-conditioned approaches fail, while a naive site selection approach achieves superior performance by strategically selecting training episodes. Analysis of learned strategies reveals distinct management philosophies, where carbon-focused policies favor aggressive high-density coniferous stands, while effective multi-objective policies balance species composition and density to protect permafrost while maintaining carbon gains. Our results demonstrate that robust climate-adaptive forest management remains challenging for current MORL methods, establishing BoreaRL as a valuable benchmark for developing more effective approaches. We open-source BoreaRL to accelerate research in multi-objective RL for climate applications.