Landscape implications of managing forests for carbon sequestration

Abstract

We explore the implications of managing forests for the dual purpose of sequestering carbon and producing timber, using a model of the forest sector that includes a Hartman-based representation of forest owners’ behaviour as well as heterogeneity in environmental conditions. We focus on France, where recent policies aim at increasing the carbon sink and where the diversity of forests makes an analysis of spatial dynamics relevant, and we use recent estimates of the shadow price of carbon consistent with the country’s climate commitments. Results suggest that forests may sequester up to 550 MtCO2eq by 2100, driven by changes in harvest levels and species choice, whilst rotation lengths increase overall. A spatial analysis reveals a high spatial variability for these trends, highlighting the importance of considering the local context. Changes in investment patterns affect the spatial distribution of forest cover types: by the end of the century, a majority of regions comprise a larger share of older, multiple-species and mixed-structure forests. Whilst such an evolution may present benefits in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem services provision and resilience, it raises questions regarding the adequacy of such developments with current forest policy, which also aims at increasing harvest levels. An overall mitigation strategy for the forest sector would likely include incentives to energy and material substitution in downstream industries, which we did not consider and may interact with sequestration incentives.

A Bioeconomic Projection of Climate‐Induced Wildfire Risk in the Forest Sector

“…Forest sector dynamics are simulated using the French Forest Sector Model (FFSM), a bio‐economic numerical simulation model of French forestry and timber industries (Caurla et al., 2010; Lobianco et al., 2015; Lobianco, Delcote, et al., 2016) previously used to assess forests' climate mitigation potential through bioenergy production, carbon sequestration and land‐use dynamics (e.g., Caurla et al., 2013, 2018; Delacote, Lobianco, et al., 2021; Riviere & Caurla, 2020b). The FFSM is recursive, uses yearly time steps and comprises 4 sub‐models. First, forest resources are represented as timber volumes in a matrix‐based inventory model across 6 forest types, 13 diameters classes and 8.500 8‐km pixels.…”

“…At the sectoral scale, further integration can be provided by using forest sector models, i.e., large‐scale simulation models that encompass the whole value chain from forest resources to timber industries (Latta et al., 2013; Riviere & Caurla, 2020a). Forest sector models have been largely used to assess the forest sector's potential to mitigate climate change (e.g., Favero et al., 2020; Lauri et al., 2014; Riviere & Caurla, 2020b), but comparatively less studies have been dedicated to assessing the impacts of climate change. Most of these assessments focus on the global scale (Favero et al., 2018; Sohngen et al., 2001; Tian et al., 2016), which impedes taking into account local specificities on which many disturbance processes depend.…”

The economics of forest carbon sequestration: a bibliometric analysis

“…Forest economic policies and incentives can largely in uence the process of carbon sequestration (Sedjo and Sohngen 2012) but there are various risks and uncertainties in the assessment of carbon sequestration related to carbon permanence, additionality, and leakage (Obersteiner et al 2005;Sedjo and Sohngen 2012). There are also some issues associated with the payments for carbon sequestration i. e., choosing a viable reference with respect to which carbon storage is compared, variability across the places and the form taken by payments (Van Kooten and Johnston 2016; Gren and Zeleke 2016;Riviere and Caurla 2021). Regarding the economics of forest carbon sequestration, there is a huge scope of research that could lead to a general consensus on e cient valuation methods and policy instruments to promote it for climate change mitigation.…”

How to recognize different types of trees from quite a long way away: combining UAV and spaceborne imagery for stand-level tree species identification

“…As a result, it is important to consider both functional and structural biodiversity in forested environments (Saarinen et al 2017) as trees provide the general architecture upon which other forest-dwelling species interact (Hastings et al 2020). Since trees are long-lived and immobile the distribution of tree species across a landscape can have major implications in how wildlife may make use of certain habitats (Hagar et al 2020;North et al 2017) and how foresters must respond to meet management targets (Riviere and Caurla 2020). In this way the composition of the dominant canopy of a forest may be considered an appropriate and broadly visible measure of the overall biodiversity within both a specific tree stand and within the larger forested landscape that is composed of these individual stands (Nevalainen et al 2017;Tuominen et al 2017).…”

“…Worldwide, forests have been shown to act as major carbon sinks that can help mitigate climate change and sequester carbon from the atmosphere (Hubau et al 2020;Riviere and Caurla 2020). This creates a need to accurately quantify carbon stored in biomass across large-scale and often remote, difficult-to-access areas (Jucker et al 2017).…”