http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/communication/news/single-news/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=865&cHash=61a6191de9b3037831fe84cafe32bcaf
Not all forest management helps to mitigate climate change
03.02.2016
An international research team, lead by the Laboratoire des Sciences du
Climat et de l'Environnement - Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (LSCE/IPSL)
in France and including lead author Kim Naudts from the department "The
Land in the Atmosphere" at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
(MPI-M), found that two and a half centuries of afforestation and forest
management in Europe have failed to mitigate climate warming. Their
findings have been published recently in Science.
The team reconstructed 260-years of historical land use in Europe and
improved a complex computer model to calculate the amount of carbon,
energy and water that is trapped or released by managing a forest. By
doing this they could analyse the effect of historical afforestation and
forest management on the carbon balance and the contemporary climate.
Afforestation and forest management are recognized as key strategies for
climate change mitigation in the Paris agreement within the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Afforestation
and forest management are generally expected to have the potential to
slow global warming by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. However, the
new study shows that, despite a considerable increase in forest area and
the onset of widespread production-oriented management since 1750,
European forests failed to realize a net CO2 removal from the
atmosphere. By extracting wood from unmanaged forest and bringing these
forests under production, humans released carbon to the atmosphere,
otherwise stored in the biomass, litter, dead wood and soil of the
forest. Kim Naudts, lead author of the study explains: "Even well
managed present-day forest store much less carbon than their natural
counterparts in 1750".
Besides wood harvest, the onset of production-oriented forestry also
massively converted deciduous forest to coniferous forest by favouring
commercially successful species. This resulted in changes in water and
energy exchange with the atmosphere, which contributed to climate
warming rather than mitigating it. Kim Naudts concludes: "Our results
show that not all forest management contributed to climate change
mitigation. The key question is now: can we design a forest management
strategy that cools the climate and at the same time sustains wood
production and other ecosystem services?"
Original publication:
Naudts, K., Chen, Y., McGrath, M.J., Ryder, J., Valade, A., Otto, J.,
Luyssaert, S.: Europe's forest management did not mitigate climate
warming (2016). Science,
Opens external link in current windowdoi: 10.1126/science.aad7270
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