We present different definitions of forest resilience and discuss how this concept can be used to guide forest management under a changing climate. Forest resilience can be seen as an overarching concept of nested hierarchies, with engineering resilience being nested inside ecological resilience, which in turn is nested inside social-ecological resilience. Active land use and targeted pro-active management to increase forest resilience are crucial strategies to address increased disturbance risks. Indicator-based resilience assessments offer great potential in monitoring of forest vulnerability and steering forward-looking risk management strategies towards enhanced forest resilience. More experience needs to be gathered to identify good practice examples and recommend suitable metrics to operationally adopt the forest resilience concept for safeguarding future forest ecosystem services, including the conservation of biodiversity in a changing climate.