Juan Moreno-Cruz

Kevin Bradley Dsouza, Enoch Ofosu, Daniel Chukwuemeka Amaogu et al.

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 $\textbf{BoreaRL}$, 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 preference-conditioned approaches fail entirely, while a naive curriculum learning 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.

Kevin Bradley Dsouza, Graham Alexander Watt, Yuri Leonenko et al.

Collective action problems, which require aligning individual incentives with collective goals, are classic examples of Ill-Structured Problems (ISPs). For an individual agent, the causal links between local actions and global outcomes are unclear, stakeholder objectives often conflict, and no single, clear algorithm can bridge micro-level choices with macro-level welfare. We present ECHO-MIMIC, a computational framework that converts this global complexity into a tractable, Well-Structured Problem (WSP) for each agent by discovering compact, executable heuristics and persuasive rationales. The framework operates in two stages: ECHO (Evolutionary Crafting of Heuristics from Outcomes) evolves snippets of Python code that encode candidate behavioral policies, while MIMIC (Mechanism Inference & Messaging for Individual-to-Collective Alignment) evolves companion natural language messages that motivate agents to adopt those policies. Both phases employ a large-language-model-driven evolutionary search: the LLM proposes diverse and context-aware code or text variants, while population-level selection retains those that maximize collective performance in a simulated environment. We demonstrate this framework on a canonical ISP in agricultural landscape management, where local farming decisions impact global ecological connectivity. Results show that ECHO-MIMIC discovers high-performing heuristics compared to baselines and crafts tailored messages that successfully align simulated farmer behavior with landscape-level ecological goals. By coupling algorithmic rule discovery with tailored communication, ECHO-MIMIC transforms the cognitive burden of collective action into a simple set of agent-level instructions, making previously ill-structured problems solvable in practice and opening a new path toward scalable, adaptive policy design.