[ NATO-PCO Home Page ] [ Table of Contents of NEWSLETTER # 58 ]

........ published in NEWSLETTER # 58

FOREST ECOSYSTEMS, FOREST MANAGEMENT AND THE GLOBAL CARBON CYCLE
by Dr. M.J. Apps and Dr. D.T. Price, Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Edmonton/Alberta (Canada)

This book (NATO ASI SERIES I40) provides a contemporary review by leading experts on the role of global forests on the C cycle, a topic brought into sharp public focus by concerns about global warming.

Part I deals with past and present contributions of global forests to C cycling between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Important natural regulators of C fluxes are reviewed, as well as human influences, such as CO2 fertilization, N fertilization due to pollution, land-use change, and forest management. These processes may all contribute to the so-called "missing C sink", widely believed to lie mainly in forested ecosystems of the northern hemisphere, although, as the book reveals, identifying a single, precise mechanism may be impossible. The possible consequences of global climate warming - due to anthropogenically increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases - are considered in chapters on natural disturbances and other possible climatic feedbacks. In Part II, the C budget implications of forest land-use and land- use change (particularly as it affects tropical forest distribution and structure) are considered. Historical removal of temperature forests and conversion to agricultural use released significant quantities of C in past centuries. More recently, these trends have stabilized and even begun to reverse, although deforestation and degradation of some forests, notably in tropical regions, remain important sources of C emissions to the atmosphere. Chapters are devoted to estimation of the current state of forests in the remoter regions - the tropics and boreal Asia - and to assessments of changes in forest C dynamics, in the recent past and foreseeable future, in Europe and North America.

Forest management and wood products are the focus of Part III. Several chapters explore the possible mitigation of C emissions by regional forests and the wood products industry, and practical recommendations are presented in a working group paper. Forest management which increases forest ecosystem C storage is seen of value in mitigating GHG emissions, but only over the short term. In many cases, this strategy proves expensive due to costs of protection against disturbances and loss of revenue from harvesting. The alternative is to store C in wood products and to manage forests with this objective. The largest C gains are likely to be obtained from energy substitution (either direct, using forest fiber as a biofuel, or indirect where wood-based construction materials replace products requiring high energy input, such as steel and luminium).

Part IV discusses socio-economic aspects of managing global forests as C stores. How local forest-use conflicts can be resolved while meeting global responsibilities, including carbon storage, is a challenging problem. Three chapters suggest economic criteria which may be used to assign values to C storage, help eliminate forest destruction and encourage conservation. Three others address the thorny problem of tropical deforestation and forest degradation. Discussions of the problems of managing forests for carbon, both at the regional and global scales, round out the section.

An Epilogue closes the book with an elegant summary of the issues. It stresses the need for a scientifically based global policy on forest management and makes the case for immediate action at the highest levels if catastrophic losses of global forest resources are to be avoided.
Reference books: A244, G16, I15, I33, I40

[ NATO-PCO Home Page ]