The European forest carbon budget under future climate conditions and current management practices

To become carbon neutral by 2050, the European Union (EU27) net carbon sink from forests should increase from the current level of about -360 Mt CO2e yr-1 to -450 Mt CO2e yr-1 by 2050. Reaching this target requires additional efforts, which should be informed by the expected interactions between current age-class distributions, the effect of forest management practices and the expected impacts of future climate change. However, modelling the combined effect of these drivers is challenging since it requires a mechanistic assessment of climate impacts on primary productivity and heterotrophic respiration, and a detailed representation of the forest age structure and of the management practices across the entire EU. We combined the output provided by four land-climate models to parameterize the input data used in an empirical forest growth model. This hybrid modelling approach aims to quantify the impact of climate change and forest management on the long-term (i.e., to 2100) evolution of the EU27+UK forest carbon budget. We emphasize that our study does not explore a specific policy scenario but describes a methodological framework. Under our BAU case, the EU27+UK forest C sink would decrease to about -250 Mt CO2e yr-1 in 2050 and -80 Mt CO2e yr-1 by 2100. Climate change may further amplify or mitigate this trend. Due to the large uncertainty of climate projections, in 2050 the net C sink may range from -100 to -400 Mt CO2e yr-1 CO2e yr-1 under RCP 2.6, and from -100 to -300 Mt CO2e yr-1 under RCP 6.0.

PILLI Roberto;  ALKAMA Romain;  CESCATTI Alessandro;  KURZ Werner;  GRASSI Giacomo; 

2022-07-18

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH

JRC128209

1726-4170 (online),   

https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/3263/2022/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128209,   

10.5194/bg-19-3263-2022 (online),