FORESTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: ROLE OF FOREST LANDS AS CARBON SINKS XI WORLD FORESTRY CONGRESS Antalya, Turkey, 13 to 22 October 1997 VOLUME 1, TOPIC 4 FORESTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: ROLE OF FOREST LANDS AS CARBON SINKS Sandra Brown1 SUMMARY INTRODUCTION CURRENT ROLE OF FORESTS IN THE GLOBAL C CYCLE INCREASING C SINKS THROUGH FOREST MANAGEMENT CONCLUSION 1 US Environmental Protection Agency, National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, Western Ecology Division, 200 SW 35th Street, Corvallis, OR 97333, USA CONCLUSION To balance the global C budget, evidence suggests that net CO2 emissions from the world's forests must be close to zero. That is, although forests are an important component of the global C cycle through their regulation of C fluxes and pools, at present they are likely to be contributing little to global warming. This could change in the future for many reasons, including continued increasing clearing and degradation of tropical forests, maturing of mid- and high-latitudes forests, and increased mortality and wildfires of mid- and high-latitude forests as they succumb to climate change. However, through the implementation of forest management options that are compatible with traditional objectives of forestry, there is a potential to conserve and sequester significant amounts of C over the next 50 yr or so. Aggressive adoption of forest management options that conserve and sequester C are not only necessary for sustainable development but also for preventing forests from becoming a significant net source of CO2 to the atmosphere in the future and contributing to climate change. Acknowledgements Much of the material in this paper is drawn from Brown et al. (1996), a chapter in the IPCC Second Assessment Report I thank my co-authors and many of the contributors to that chapter for ideas presented here. The information in this document has been funded wholly by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. It has been subjected to the Agency's peer and administrative review, and it has been approved for publication as an EPA document. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute endorsement or recommendation for use Bibliography Brown, S., C. A. S. Hall, W. Knabe, J. Raich, M. C. Trexler, and P. Woomer, 1993a: Tropical forests: their past, present, and potential future role in the terrestrial carbon budget. Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 70:71-94. Brown, S., L. R. Iverson, A. Prasad, and D. Liu, 1993b: Geographical distribution of carbon in biomass and soils of tropical Asian forests. Geocarto International 8:45-60.. Brown, S., A. E. Lugo, and J. Wisniewski, 1992: Missing carbon dioxide. Science 257:11. 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Average annual rates of C conservation and sequestration per decade through implementation of forest management options given in Table 2 by (a) geographical region and (b) forest management option (based on Brown et al. 1996). « Previous Section - Next Section » Download the Pdf file for this topic (453 K) Send feedback to: World-Forestry-Congress-XI@FAO.ORG