Abstract
Abstract. Forests are the main source of biomass production from solar energy and take up around 2.4±0.4 PgC per year globally. Future changes in climate may affect forest growth and productivity. Currently, state-of-the-art Earth system models use prescribed wood harvest rates in future climate projections. These rates are defined by integrated assessment models (IAMs), only accounting for regional wood demand and largely ignoring the supply side from forests. Therefore, we assess how global growth and harvest potentials of forests change when they are allowed to respond to changes in environmental conditions. For this, we simulate wood harvest rates oriented towards the actual rate of forest growth. Applying this growth-based harvest rule (GB) in JSBACH, the land component of the Max Planck Institute's Earth system model, forced by several future climate scenarios, we realized a growth potential 2 to 4 times (3–9 PgC yr−1) the harvest rates prescribed by IAMs (1–3 PgC yr−1). Limiting GB to managed forest areas (MF), we simulated a harvest potential of 3–7 PgC yr−1, 2 to 3 times higher than IAMs. This highlights the need to account for the dependence of forest growth on climate. To account for the long-term effects of wood harvest as integrated in IAMs, we added a life cycle analysis, showing that the higher supply with MF as an adaptive forest harvesting rule may improve the net mitigation effects of forest harvest during the 21st century by sequestering carbon in anthropogenic wood products.
Highlights
Forest ecosystems play a major role in taking up global CO2 emissions and affect global climate conditions through a range of complex biophysical and biogeochemical processes
The managed forest areas (MF) harvest potentials are 2 to 3 times (3–7 PgC yr−1) as high as those of prescribed wood harvest simulated by integrated assessment models (IAMs) for the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)
We recommend that future research on integration of management strategies in DGVMs and Earth system models (ESMs) should regard ecological sustainability as well as socioeconomic challenges
Summary
Forest ecosystems play a major role in taking up global CO2 emissions and affect global climate conditions through a range of complex biophysical and biogeochemical processes. A large part of this uptake can be attributed to direct and indirect human interference: direct human impact by forest management creates young forests that sequester carbon during regrowth (Houghton et al, 2012) and provides material for fossil-fuel substitution (Nabuurs et al, 2013). Forest utilization and interaction of management with largescale natural disturbances, such as forest fires, may immediately emit tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere and act as a source of CO2 emissions (Bonan, 2008). Indirect human impact alters environmental conditions, in particular climate and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which historically has caused carbon uptake by the terrestrial vegetation (Le Quéré et al, 2018). Any change in environmental conditions affects forest growth, risks of hazards, and productivity and, the amount of wood that can be harvested (Temperli et al, 2012; Sohngen and Tian, 2016)
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