Projecting global and regional outlooks for planted forests under the shared socio-economic pathways

Jaana Korhonen,Frederick W Cubbage,Jeffrey P Prestemon,Prakash Nepal

doi:10.1007/s11056-020-09789-z

Abstract

There is rising global interest in growing more trees in order to meet growing population, climate change, and wood energy needs. Using recently published data on planted forests by country, we estimated relationships between per capita income and planted forest area that are useful for understanding prospective planted forest area futures through 2100 under various United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-inspired Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). Under all SSPs, projections indicate increasing global planted forest area trends for the next three to four decades and declining trends thereafter, commensurate with the quadratic functions employed. Our projections indicate somewhat less total future planted forest area than prior linear forecasts. Compared to 293 million ha (Mha) of planted forests globally in 2015, SSP5 (a vision of a wealthier world) projects the largest increase (to 334 Mha, a 14% gain) by 2055, followed by SSP2 (a continuation of historical socio-economic trends, to 327 Mha, or an 11% gain), and SSP3 (a vision of a poorer world, to 319 Mha, a 9% gain). The projected trends for major world regions differ from global trends, consistent with differing socio-economic development trajectories in those regions. Our projections based on empirical FAO data for the past 25 years, as well as those by other researchers, suggest that achieving the much more ambitious global planted forest targets proposed recently will require exceptional forest land and investment supply shifts.

Highlights

Planted forests provide many benefits including traditional wood production, employment and economic development, and have been identified as a key means to ameliorate climate change in the short to medium term
There are a number of multi-national forest restoration and creation initiatives, including, among others, the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which was first endorsed at the United Nations climate summit in 2014 (UN 2014), and the Bonn Challenge, which is a platform to achieve multiple restoration targets under one initiative (IUCN 2015)
This study provides topical and novel future projections of planted forest area under three distinct Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) representing varying world visions that were developed in conjunction with the IPCC Fifth Assessment

Summary

Introduction

Planted forests provide many benefits including traditional wood production, employment and economic development, and have been identified as a key means to ameliorate climate change in the short to medium term. Climate change could affect the area of productive land available for agriculture and other growing, independent of population and economic growth related pressures (e.g., Zhang and Cai 2011; King et al 2018). The IPCC (2019) summarizes, with a high level of scientific confidence, that “changes in forest cover, for example from afforestation, reforestation and deforestation, directly affect regional surface temperature through exchanges of water and energy”, anticipating that the potential role of forests in mitigating the effects of climate change will only increase. For example, The World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Forests Report projects that around 250 million hectares of new planted forests would be established globally between 2010 and 2050 under a scenario involving expanded wood use in the bioenergy sector (WWF 2012)

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