9.9 Long-term outlook

Mitigation measures up to 2030 can prevent the biosphere going into a net source globally. The longer-term mitigation prospects (beyond 2030) within the forestry sector will be influenced by the interrelationship of a complex set of environmental, socio-economic and political factors. The history of land-use and forest management processes in the last century, particularly within the temperate and boreal regions, as well as on the recent patterns of land-use will have a critical effect on the mitigation potential.

Several studies have shown that uncertainties in the contemporary carbon cycle, the uncertain future impacts of climatic change and its many dynamic feedbacks can cause large variation in future carbon balance projections (Lewis et al., 2005). Other scenarios suggest that net deforestation pressure will slow over time as population growth slows and crop and livestock productivity increase. Despite continued projected loss of forest area, carbon uptake from afforestation and reforestation could result in net sequestration (Section 3.2.2).

Also, the impacts of climate change on forests will be a major source of uncertainty regarding future projections (Viner et al., 2006). Other issues that will have an effect on the long-term mitigation potential include future sectoral changes within forestry, changes in other economic sectors, as well as political and social change, and the particular development paths within industrialized and developing countries beyond the first half of the 21st century. The actual mitigation potential will depend ultimately on solving structural problems linked to the sustainable management of forests. Such structural problems include securing land tenure and land rights of indigenous people, reducing poverty levels in rural areas and the rural-urban divide, and providing disincentives to short-term behaviour of economic actors and others. Considering that forests store more carbon dioxide than the entire atmosphere (Stern, 2006), the role of forests is critical.

Forestry mitigation projections are expected to be regionally unique, while still linked across time and space by changes in global physical and economic forces. Overall, it is expected that boreal primary forests will either be sources or sinks depending on the net effect of some enhancement of growth due to climate change versus a loss of soil organic matter and emissions from increased fires. The temperate forests in USA, Europe, China and Oceania, will probably continue to be net carbon sinks, favoured also by enhanced forest growth due to climate change. In the tropical regions, the human induced land-use changes are expected to continue to drive the dynamics for decades. In the meantime, the enhanced growth of large areas of primary forests, secondary regrowth, and increasing plantation areas will also increase the sink. Beyond 2040, depending on the extent and effectiveness of forest mitigation activities within tropical areas, and very particularly on the effectiveness of policies aimed at reducing forest degradation and deforestation, tropical forest may become net sinks. In the medium to long term as well, commercial bio-energy is expected to become increasingly important.

In the long-term, carbon will only be one of the goals that drive land-use decisions. Within each region, local solutions have to be found that optimize all goals and aim at integrated and sustainable land use. Developing the optimum regional strategies for climate change mitigation involving forests will require complex analyses of the trade-offs (synergies and competition) in land-use between forestry and other land uses, the trade-offs between forest conservation for carbon storage and other environmental services such as biodiversity and watershed conservation and sustainable forest harvesting to provide society with carbon-containing fibre, timber and bio-energy resources, and the trade-offs among utilization strategies of harvested wood products aimed at maximizing storage in long-lived products, recycling, and use for bioenergy.