Effect of climate change on the land rent of radiata pine plantations in Chile: Site productivity and forest fires

Abstract

Climate change can severely affect forest plantation productivity and fire regimes in temperate regions. The economic evaluation of these impacts is challenging because of the spatially differentiated effects expected to occur across planted areas. We calculated the combined effect of projected climate change on the stochastic land expectation value (SLEV) for a random sample of stands covering the Pinus radiata plantations in central-southern Chile. To simplify the stochastic evaluation problem with changing productivity and fire frequencies over time, we divided rotations into stages, before and after commercial thinning, and assumed that reforestation is at the end of each stage. The SLEV was calculated through Monte Carlo simulations using the coefficients from previously estimated productivity and fire risk statistical models. The predicted combined effect on the SLEV is negative in most regions except those in the southern limit of the specie distribution. In the economically crucial coastal area of the central regions, the negative effect of more frequent fires outweighs faster growth. In the northern drier areas, the SLEV becomes negative due to a large drop in site productivity. Anticipatory reassignments of management regimes have a large adaptation value in these low-productivity sites. Our optimization-simulation results suggest that relative to prescribed management regimes, the optimal rotation age in most low-productivity sites is longer and in most high-productivity sites shorter. Shortening the rotation age by one to two years has an important adaptation value in highly productive coastal sites.