ABSTRACT

The potential for carbon storage in forests to alleviate greenhouse emissions and attendant climate change, and the option of doing so with uneven-aged multispecies forests, is of current high interest due to their diversity of species and stand structure. This chapter proposes methods of investigating the economics of carbon storage with uneven-aged management at stand level, and especially the trade-off with timber production. Nonlinear programming is used to find sustainable management regimes that maximize timber revenues or CO2 sequestration only, or timber revenues subject to a CO2 sequestration floor, or in the presence of markets for CO2, the combined production of timber with income from carbon storage. The methods allow derivation of a schedule of the supply for carbon storage in terms of the price of CO2e. Although applicable to many forest ecosystems, the methods are illustrated with an application to forests of Norway spruce, pine, birch and other hardwoods. In this context, there is a clear conflict between carbon storage and diversity of forests as carbon storage is maximized with monospecific stands. Furthermore, although carbon sequestration must ultimately conflict with timber production, such conflict is not significant unless the price of CO2 increases considerably.