Abstract
To mitigate global climatic changes, long-term carbon trading and carbon taxes have been implemented in many countries. However, carbon prices have varied in many of these regions. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to evaluate the effects of carbon prices on trade-offs between forest carbon and timber management objectives in spatial harvest scheduling problems. The objective function of the planning problem was designed to maximize the discounted net present value of harvested timber and the differences of carbon stocks in living tree biomass between the beginning and end of the planning horizon (DoC) within a 30-year time frame for a large forest region in northeast China. The constraints primarily related to maintaining an even flow of harvested timber and guaranteeing the maximum opening size. Forest developments were simulated using a set of standard stand-level growth and yield models, and the solutions of the planning problem were generated using the standard version of a simulated annealing algorithm. The effects of a wide range of carbon prices on the harvested timber and DoC levels were examined. The results showed that the trade-offs between forest harvested timber and the DoC displayed a typical nonlinear tendency as carbon prices increased. The current carbon prices (i.e., 25, 50 and 75 ¥/ton) in China had no significant effects on the optimal forest management plans compared with a scenario that used a carbon price of zero. The minimum carbon price that can provide the financial incentive for the forests to function as a significant carbon sink was estimated to be somewhat over 800 ¥/ton. This result could be useful in determining the appropriate carbon offset standard in this region.
Highlights
Forest ecosystems provide a number of economic, ecological and social values [1]
The study area was located at the Pangu forest farm (52◦ 410 57.1” N, 123◦ 510 56.5” E), Heilongjiang
The farm is characterized by rolling mountainous terrain with elevations that range from 230 to1397 m
Summary
Forest ecosystems provide a number of economic (e.g., timber and non-timber products), ecological (e.g., carbon sequestration, water resources, and biodiversity) and social values (e.g., recreation and employment opportunities for local residents) [1]. The carbon sequestration of forest ecosystems is receiving substantially more attention as a result of global climate change. China is an extensively forested country with productive forests that in 2013 covered approximately 22% of the land area, provided a volume of 15,137 million. The annual volume of forest growth was estimated to be 283 million m3 , the annual harvest was 84 million m3 , and the annual carbon sequestration in forests was estimated to be 115 million tons in the 8th Forest Resources Inventory (2009–2013) [2]. China’s forests play important roles as carbon sinks in mitigating global climatic changes [3]
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