Valuing climate change impacts on European forest ecosystems

This paper presents one of the first attempts to perform a systematic assessment of the climate change impacts on European forests and its capacity to deliver ecosystem services by developing a hybrid economic valuation model. Different methods are combined to assess climate change impacts on forests by different latitudes, productivity in bio-physical terms and related economic consequences. Our computation shows that countries within the Mediterranean European geo-climatic zone will benefit from the highest welfare gain in moving towards an environmentally oriented scenario. The welfare gain has been estimated around 86% increase in the cultural values, 45% increase in the value of carbon sequestration and 24% increase in the values of wood forest products. The other countries show an intermediate state of affairs with mixed results. On the other hand, high welfare losses are always expected when moving to the more economically oriented scenarios, with the highest impacts among the Northern European countries. Results show that all storylines describe significant impacts on human wellbeing. These economic magnitudes contribute to a better understanding of the potential welfare loss across different regions and therefore will have important policy implications, such as developing the ecosystem-base adaption measures for Europe to cope with climate change.