The Impacts of Climate Change on Forestry

The quantitative analysis of the impact of future climate change on forests and forestry began in the 1980s, motivated by research in the atmospheric sciences and concerns about the potential impacts of climate change on forest ecosystems. These analyses suggested that forest ecosystems would be seriously impacted by climate change, with consequent impacts on the forest sector. It was not until the mid-1990s that the ecological and the economic impacts were first modeled together at the national scale. The RPA Timber Assessment was the first national timber assessment model to include climate change scenarios impacting forest productivity and the forest sector. The modeling treatment of climate change included exogenous analyses of climate change impact on ecosystem productivity under various climate change scenarios and linked such analyses to the forest sector modeling system. These analyses and the work that built on this approach suggest the importance of integrating ecological dynamics with the economic in the assessment of climate change on forests.