Abstract
Research Highlights: Long-term global scenarios give insights on how social and economic developments and international agreements may impact land use, trade, product markets, and carbon balances. They form a valuable basis for forming national forest policies. Many aspects related to long-term management of forests and consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services can only be addressed at regional and landscape levels. In order to be attended to in the policy process, there is a need for a method that downscales national scenarios to these finer levels. Background and Objectives: Regional framework conditions depend on management activities in the country as a whole. The aim of this study is to evaluate the use of a forest sector model (FSM) as a method for downscaling national scenarios results to regional level. The national FSM takes the global scenario data (e.g., harvest level and market prices over time) and solves the national problem. The result for the region of interest is taken as framework conditions for the regional study. Materials and Methods: Two different specifications are tested. One lets product volumes and prices represent endogenous variables in the FSM model. The other takes volumes and prices from the global scenario as exogenous parameters. The first specification attains a maximum net social payoff whereas the second specification means that net present value is maximized under a harvest constraint. Results: The maximum net social payoff specification conforms better to economic factors than the maximum net present value specification but could give national harvest volume trajectories that deviates from what is derived from the global model. This means that regional harvest activity can deviate considerably from the national average, attesting to the benefit of the use of the FSM-based method
Highlights
The forest sector is facing major challenges because of the emerging modern bioeconomy and the implementation of international climate change mitigation agreements
The aim of this study is to evaluate the use of a forest sector model (FSM) as a method for downscaling the global scenario results to the regional level, here represented by four counties
The MaxNSP model formulation is the standard formulation for partial equilibrium models (PEM) [20] with a strong footing in economic theory [31]
Summary
The forest sector is facing major challenges because of the emerging modern bioeconomy and the implementation of international climate change mitigation agreements. National forest policies are currently developed in many countries. In the European Union (EU), member states form National. Global scenarios of socioeconomic development have been pointed out as important when performing national-level analysis and discussing how policy-making may tackle trade-offs between conflicting objectives [1,2,3,4]. One set of global scenarios that is commonly used to perform such analysis is the global Shared Socioeconomic. Pathways (SSP) and Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios. While these global scenarios were originally developed to help produce the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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