The Loop Effect: How Climate Change Impacts the Mitigation Potential of the French Forest Sector

Delacote, Philippe; Lobianco, Antonello; Caurla, Sylvain; Bontemps, Jean‐Daniel; Lungarska, Anna; Mérian, Pierre; Rivière, Miguel; Barkaoui, Ahmed

doi:10.1561/112.00000522

Cited by 1 publication

(6 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…These results underline the importance of considering not only several climate outlooks, but also reassert the need to take into account uncertainty related to climate models’ responses as suggested by Delacote, Lobianco, et al. (2021) and also stress the relevance of considering variability intrinsic to environmental processes. While these factors are commonly accounted for in environmental sciences (Lehner et al., 2020), their consideration in economic assessments is rarer and needs to become more common.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

“…On the other hand, forecasts of forest sector dynamics were dominated by the choice of the warming level and that of the climate model, especially in the long-term, while, on the medium term, uncertainty due to fire stochasticity was significant. These results underline the importance of considering not only several climate outlooks, but also reassert the need to take into account uncertainty related to climate models' responses as suggested by Delacote, Lobianco, et al (2021) and also stress the relevance of considering variability intrinsic to environmental processes. While these factors are commonly accounted for in environmental sciences (Lehner et al, 2020), their consideration in economic assessments is rarer and needs to become more common.…”

Section: Uncertainties and Prospective Assessmentssupporting

confidence: 60%

“…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.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Model outputs are used to partition different sources of uncertainty (11 fire activity. As we focus on fire-related impacts and on the propagation of uncertainty, in this work, climate is assumed not to impact forest growth beyond fire mortality, which were investigated in previous works (Delacote, Lobianco, et al, 2021;.…”

Section: Soft-coupling Between the Models And Scenariosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Climate change is expected to also affect background tree mortality, growth, species ranges, as well as other forest disturbances, which may in addition interact with wildfires (Lindner et al, 2010b;Seidl et al, 2017). Previous forest sector model-based assessments have been dedicated to such issues, both for France (Caurla et al, 2015;Delacote, Lobianco, et al, 2021;Petucco et al, 2019) and other regions (Hanewinkel et al, 2013;Sohngen & Haynes, 1997;Tian et al, 2016), and a significant future challenge resides in their integration.…”

Section: Study Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2022

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Under the influence of climate change, wildfire regimes are expected to intensify and expand to new areas, increasing threats to natural and socioeconomic assets. We explore the environmental and economic implications for the forest sector of climate‐induced changes in wildfire regimes. To retain genericity while considering local determinants, we focus on the regional level and take Mediterranean France as an example. Coupling a bioeconomic forest sector model and a model of wildfire activity, we perform spatially explicit simulations under various levels of radiative forcing. By using a probabilistic framework, we also assess the propagation of several sources of uncertainty to the forest sector, considering both climate‐induced uncertainty and the intrinsic stochasticity of the fire process. By the end of the century, summer burned areas increase by up to 55%, causing moderate losses of merchantable timber and forest carbon stocks, with cascading impacts for industrial activities and climate mitigation in the forest sector. Implications for industries remain limited, but we observe price increases, especially for softwoods, as well as spatially differentiated changes in producer welfare. Inter‐annual fluctuations explain most of uncertainty in wildfire activity, but their impacts on the forest sector are quickly dampened. Over time, owing to the cumulative nature of wildfire impacts on forest resources, uncertainty related to climate warming, climate models’ response and stochasticity intrinsic to the wildfire phenomenon strongly increase in relative importance. Results reassert the need to consider multiple futures in prospective assessments, including uncertainty inherent to natural processes, often omitted in large‐scale economic assessments.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

Section: Uncertainties and Prospective Assessmentssupporting

confidence: 60%