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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Copyright Large-scale dynamics of a heterogeneous forest resource are driven jointly by geographically varying growth conditions, tree species composition and stand structure

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International audiencePart of the French timber transformation industry suffers from difficulties to adapt to recent changes on global markets. This translates into net exports of raw wood and imports of transformed products, detrimental to both the trade balance and the local creation of wealth. At the same time, no consistent and homogeneous accounts for wood product production and consumption exist at this time. This article first aims at objectifying this situation by undertaking the first material flow analysis of the French forest-wood supply chain. We then evaluate the potential consequences of various scenarios of raw wood exports reduction policies, namely subsidies for consumption or transformation and taxation of exports, on both economic outcomes for the different actors and material flows. We thus provide an example of coupling material flow analysis with economic modeling in an attempt to move from the diagnostic phase to the assessment of possible actions within a decision-making perspective

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As European countries move towards steeper cuts in greenhouse gases emissions, questions are mounting, in the forest sector, about the best balance between policies that favor carbon sequestration in biomass, and policies that favor fossil-fuel substitution, with potentially conflicting implications for forest management. We provide insights on this debate by comparing the environmental and economic implications for the French forest sector of a "stock" policy (payment for sequestration in situ), a "substitution" policy (subsidy to fuelwood consumption), and a combination thereof - all calibrated on the same price of carbon. To do so, we use the French Forest Sector Model (FFSM), which combines a dynamic model of French timber resource and a dynamic partial-equilibrium model of the French forest sector. Simulations over the 2010-2020 period show that the stock policy is the only one that performs better than business-as-usual in terms of carbon. In the substitution policy, cumulative substitution benefits are not sufficient to offset carbon losses in standing forests over this biologically short, but politically relevant period of time. And the combination policy does not perform better. However, the stock policy has negative impacts on consumers welfare, its costs are increasing over time as carbon is accumulated, and it raises political economy questions about the negotiability of the reference against which excess carbon is measured

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As France works out its plan to tackle climate change issues, questions are arising in the forest sector as to how sectoral mitigation programs such as those designed to enhance fuelwood consumption or to stimulate in-forest carbon sequestration may coincide with an inter-sectoral program such as an economy-wide carbon tax. This paper provides insights into this question by exploring the impacts of (1) a combination of a carbon tax and a fuelwood policy, and (2) a combination of a carbon tax and a sequestration policy on (i) the economy of the forest sector, and (ii) the dynamics of the forest resource. To do this, we used a modified version of the French Forest Sector Model (FFSM) and carried out simulations on a 2020 time horizon. Basing our analysis on the fuelwood sector, we showed that wood producers always benefit from the combination of a carbon tax with either a fuelwood policy or a sequestration policy at the national level. Conversely, and although it favors wood products instead of non-wood substitutes, a carbon tax always decreases consumer surpluses by increasing wood product prices. As a consequence, the combination of a carbon tax with sectoral policies is likely to raise questions about the political economy of the mitigation program. This is particularly true in the case of a combination of a carbon tax with a sequestration policy, which already decreases consumer surpluses. We eventually showed that by increasing transport costs between domestic regions, the carbon tax reallocates production patterns over French territory which could lead to the necessity of a regional breakdown of policy-mixes in the forest sector