Global climate change impacts on forests and markets

Abstract

This paper develops an economic analysis of climate change impacts in the global forest sector. It illustrates how potential future climate change impacts can be integrated into a dynamic forestry economics model using data from a global dynamic vegetation model, the MC2 model. The results suggest that climate change will cause forest outputs (such as timber) to increase by approximately 30% over the century. Aboveground forest carbon storage also is projected to increase, by approximately 26 Pg C by 2115, as a result of climate change, potentially providing an offset to emissions from other sectors. The effects of climate mitigation policies in the energy sector are then examined. When climate mitigation in the energy sector reduces warming, we project a smaller increase in forest outputs over the timeframe of the analysis, and we project a reduction in the sink capacity of forests of around 12 Pg C by 2115.

Assessing climate change impacts, benefits of mitigation, and uncertainties on major global forest regions under multiple socioeconomic and emissions scenarios

“…There have been many simulations of potential future forest patterns and characteristics on a global scale , Gonzalez et al 2010, Sitch et al 2008, but it is problematic to use the existing simulation outputs for quantifying and comparing climate change impacts across multiple sectors, because the sets of climate change scenarios or realizations were not coordinated among the multisector studies. The outputs from the MC2 simulation described herein were used to drive the Global Timber Model (GTM) (Sohngen et al 2001, Sohngen 2014 to study the market effects of climate change on global timber markets (Tian et al 2016). GTM takes as input from MC2 variables that broadly characterize future potential forest conditions under the different climate change scenarios: estimates of forest productivity (e.g.…”

Focus on agriculture and forestry benefits of reducing climate change impacts

“…5 In addition, there was a great deal of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the magnitude and often sign of yield impacts within a study, and between studies. Unlike agriculture, forest productivity was found to decrease under mitigation scenarios relative to unconstrained climate change in both Kim et al (2017) and Tian et al (2016), while Beach et al (2015) had a mix of increasing and decreasing forest productivity depending on the climate model used.…”

“…Using the global forest productivity projections from Kim et al (2017), Tian et al (2016) integrates future climate change impacts into a dynamic forestry economics model. The author's results suggest that climate change will cause forest outputs (such as timber) to increase by approximately 30% over the century.…”

Integrating regional climate change into allometric equations for estimating tree aboveground biomass of Masson pine in China

“…Global climate change affects all aspects of forest community structure and ecosystem production, such as seedling establishment (Daniels and Veblen 2004), tree growth and mortality Subedi and Sharma 2013;Lei et al 2016), tree species distribution (Hamann and Wang 2006;Sinervo et al 2010), competition among species (Hamann and Wang 2006;Boisvert-Marsh et al 2014;Monleon and Lintz 2015), and forest biomass and productivity (Jiang et al 2015;Tian et al 2016). Forests play an important role in mitigation of climate change by removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in biomass.…”