Abstract
Forest covers 38% of Norway’s land area, is basis for forestry and forest industries as one of the country’s most important land-based economic sectors, and provides important environmental services, like recreation, conservation of biological diversity, and sequestration of climate gases. Future climate change is of vital interest for forestry and environmental policy in Norway, and it is important to analyze which impacts climate changes may have on forests, forestry and forest industries to be able to meet future challenges as well as possible. As basis for such analyses it is a strong advantage to use forest ecosystem process models and combine their results with bioeconomic modeling. The principle objectives of the project is to develop suitable forest ecosystem process models for Norway and use them as basis for providing new research-based knowledge on how and to what degree expected climate changes are likely to influence (i) main forest ecosystem functions and (ii) forest management, income and employment in forestry and forest industries. The project has the following four sub-goals: S1: Evaluate existing forest ecosystem process models relevant for boreal forests. S2: Use the chosen process model(s) together with prognosis from RegClim to estimate the climate change impacts on main forest ecosystem functions. S3: Integrate the results from S2 into two existing bio-economic models to analyze the climate change impacts on forest management, carbon sequestration, and income/employment in the forest sector. S4: Analyze the uncertainty in the results with particular emphasis on identifying the relative importance of the main risk factors. The project will be done in cooperation with leading international institutes in the field of forest process modeling, and be based on climate change data provided by RegClim.
Norway