Managing a boreal forest landscape for providing timber, storing and sequestering carbon

Abstract

Human well-being highly depends on ecosystem services and this dependence is expected to increase in the future with increasing population and economic growth. Studies that investigate trade-offs between ecosystem services are urgently needed for informing policy-makers. We examine the trade-offs between a provisioning (revenues from timber selling) and regulating (carbon storage and sequestration) ecosystem services among seven alternative forest management regimes in a large boreal forest production landscape. First, we estimate the potential of the landscape to produce harvest revenues and store/sequester carbon across a 50-year time period. Then, we identify conflicts between harvest revenues and carbon storage and sequestration. Finally, we apply multiobjective optimization to find optimal combinations of forest management regimes that maximize harvest revenues and carbon storage/sequestration. Our results show that no management regime alone is able to either maximize harvest revenues or carbon services and that a combination of different regimes is needed. We also show that with a relatively little economic investment (5% decrease in harvest revenues), a substantial increase in carbon services could be attained (9% for carbon storage; 15–23% for carbon sequestration). We conclude that it is possible to achieve win–win situations applying diversified forest management planning at a landscape level.