- Forests and Climate Change
- Ecosystem services and sustainable urban development (ENSURE)
- Multidisciplinary Baltic Sea- Research (MULTIDOM)
- Global Environmeintal Change
- Research projects
- Climate change
- Ecosystems and biodiversity
- Global environment
- Built environment
- Environmental history
- Environmental policy
- Economy and technology
- Environmental philosophy / Ethics
Forest and Climate Change: Optimizing forest management and conservation to account for multiple interactions with the climate
Land-use related changes contribute about one sixth of the global carbon (C) emissions. While the C balance of boreal forests is reasonably well understood, other climate effects of forest management, especially drainage of peatlands, aerosols, other greenhouse gases and albedo changes are potentially large and have large uncertainties.
Adapting forest management to mitigate climate change is a multidisciplinary problem where the value of production, climate interactions and the willingness to change forest practices under other socio-economic, cultural and ecological constraints need to be considered. Here we combine expertise of ecology, atmospheric science and environmental policy and economics to assess the implications of climate change mitigation in forest management.
The research program will, for the first time, analyze jointly all potentially important climate change impacts of forestry. Tradeoffs between the different climate change impacts and interactions between climate change mitigation and other forest uses will be analyzed. The research results have high relevancy for policy makers as we will analyse the full effects of forest management on climate change, tradeoffs between climate change mitigation and other forest services, as well as the social acceptability of climate change mitigation in the forestry.
The study is a collaborative effort between University of Helsinki department of Forest Sciences, and division of Atmospheric Sciences of department of Physics and the faculty of Social Sciences, the Finnish Forest Research institute and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The studies are coordinated with activities of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence “Physics, Chemistry, Biology and meteorology of Atmospheric Properties and Climate Change”.
In order to achieve the aims, our work is divided into four Themes: 1) Forest management influence on surface fluxes and properties, 2) Influence of surface fluxes on atmospheric properties and regional radiative balance, 3) Economic analysis of climatic impact of forestry and 4) Social acceptability of forestry and climate change. Themes further divide into work packages:
| WP | WP Title | WP leader(s) |
|---|---|---|
| WP 1.1 | Carbon sequestration in forests and forest soils | Annikki Mäkelä, UHEL, Dept. Forest Sciences; Risto Sievänen, METLA |
| WP 1.2 | Drainage and silvicultural impacts on GHG dynamics in organic and mineral soil forests | Kari Minkkinen, UHEL, Dept. Forest Sciences |
| WP 1.3 | Forest management influence on surface albedo and VOC emissions | Frank Berninger, Jaana Back, UHEL, Dept. Forest Sciences |
| WP 1.4 | Impact of forest management on aerosol formation and radiative forcing | Michael Boy, UHEL, Dept. Physics, Atmospheric Sciences |
| WP 2.1 | Influence of surface fluxes and albedo on radiative forcing | Ari Laaksonen, Finnish Meteorological Institute |
| WP 2.2 | Modeling regional climatic impacts | Ari Laaksonen, Finnish Meteorological Institute |
| WP 3.1 | Management of forest stands to account for climatic and economic goals | Lauri Valsta, UHEL, Dept. Forest Sciences |
| WP 3.2 | Regional level analyses for climatic and economic goals | Maarit Kallio, Metla |
| WP 3.3 | Climate policy scenarios and the climatic impacts of forestry | Lauri Valsta, UHEL, Dept. Forest Sciences |
| WP 4.1 | Stakeholder analysis | Martin Welp, University of Sustainable Development, Eberswalde, Germany |
| WP 4.2 | Participatory decision support system | Janne Hukkinen, UHEL, Dept. Social Research |