Climate Smart Forestry Norway

The main objective of Climate Smart Forestry Norway (CSFN) is to develop a scientific framework for holistic assessments of forest management that simultaneously consider carbon, other biophysical forcings, substitution, and risk of natural disturbance while acknowledging forest owners to have a sustainable income from their forests. At the heart of CSFN is the identification of robust management approaches that lead to win-win situations from multiple perspectives. The project will provide management guidelines and advice that aim to reduce risk, mitigate climate change and ensure economic returns to the forest owner. It is expected that the European Boreal and Temperate forests will be greatly affected by climate change, causing natural disturbances to increase in frequency and severity. Global warming will decrease frozen soil periods, which increases root rot, snow, ice, and wind damage, cascading into an increment of bark beetle damage. Central Europe will experience a decrease in precipitation, which lowers tree defenses against bark beetles and increase root rot infestations. Ice and wet snow damages are expected to increase in Northern Boreal forests and to reduce in Temperate and Southern Boreal forests. However, lack of snow cover may increase cases of frost-damaged seedlings. The increased temperatures and drought periods, together with a fuel increase from other disturbances, likely enhance wildfire risk, especially for Temperate forests. To detangle how, through forest management, we can make forests less vulnerable to the impact of natural disturbances, we need to include the risk of such disturbances in decision-support models that will be developed in the project. In 2021 we have in the project worked with natural disturbances and a scientific article about previous work and models are under review. We have also worked with radiative forcings and substitution effects related to the use of wood products and a report about substitution effects will be published early in 2022. It is also been worked with radiative forcings and with the development of models for further analysis in the project. Results from the project is presented in conferences, newspaper chronicles and inserts.

IPCC (2018) state that forests and forestry play a key role in all emissions projections approaching the 1.5°C target. The Paris Agreement sets a global goal of enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change (CC). Climate Smart Forestry (CSF) has recently been introduced as a holistic approach to guide forest management in a European context. The approach is of global relevance. CSF builds on three reinforcing components; first, increasing carbon storage in forests and harvested wood products while considering also other ecosystem services; second, enhancing health, resilience and productivity through adaptive management; third, using wood products to substitute materials whose production and use causes more greenhouse gases. Norway's and Europe's forest are showing signs of a decreasing sink due to maturing forests. An ageing forest means slower growth rates and much higher risk of significant carbon emissions and economic losses due to natural disturbances, enforced by CC. Many studies consider how to increase carbon storage in forest, how to reduce the risk of a given disturbance agent, the biophysical climate effects of forest management, or the contribution of harvested wood products to carbon sequestration. What is lacking are frameworks for holistic assessments that simultaneously consider carbon, other biophysical forcing's, substitution, and risk of natural disturbance. This type of holistic assessment is at the core of CSF and the main scientific contribution. The main contribution to forest decision makers will be CSF management guidelines in the years to come. The proposed project hypothesise that we can achieve significant climate benefits through CSF in Norway and that guiding forest management only for carbon sequestration without considering risks, substitution, other biophysical forcing's will be suboptimal and in the worst case lead to increased global temperatures.