Impacts of bio-economy policies on forest ecosystem services: a boreal perspective

Abstract

One of the most pressing challenges for governments is how to move from a fossil- to a bio-based economy to achieve a sustainable growth. Bio-economy encompasses the production of renewable biological resources and the conversion of these resources into value-added products, such as biofuels. The use of bioenergy is regarded as an important climate change mitigation strategy and its annual demand is rapidly increasing. In particular, there is immense pressure to use boreal forest resources as bioenergy for meeting the challenging new bio-economy policy goals (EC 2012). For example, Finland will need to largely intensify timber production because policy aims at increasing the levels of energy production from forest wood. On the other hand, boreal forests provide crucial ecosystem services such as climate regulation through carbon storage, timber production and provision of non-timber forest products. This intensification of forest biomass extraction is potentially in conflict with forest ecosystem services like mushrooms (due to soil damaging activities during forest management) or key resources for biodiversity like deadwood. Here, first we review what is known and unknown about the effects of increased biomass harvesting on ecosystem services and biodiversity. Second, we present a modelling framework that combines forest growth simulations and optimization tools to investigate the impacts of increased forest biomass extraction on key ecosystem services (carbon storage, collectable goods and scenic beauty) and biodiversity (deadwood resources) in Finland. The work is part of the Sumforest project FutureBioEcon.

Reference:

EC (2012) Innovating for Sustainable Growth - A Bioeconomy for Europe. European Commission. Brussels.