Sustainable and multifunctional use of forest biomass

Purpose and goal:

The overall aim is to identify paths of sustainable future forest management developing the bioeconomy and multifunctional forests contributing to mitigating climate change, delivering non-woody forest ecosystem services (ES) and preserving biodiversity for the coming 30 and 100-years. The goal is to provide an understanding of the effects of alternative future paths of forest use on a wide range of production and sustainability responses.

Expected results and effects:

Our research will add one dimension, climate change mitigation based on life-cycle asssessment (LCA), to the current joint analysis of forestry and biodiversity conservation. This will provide quantitative understanding of the trade-offs between storing wood biomass in the forest versus harvesting it for storage in bioproducts on the three aspects (forestry) bioeconomy (including also non-woody ecosystem services), biodiversity and climate change mitigation.

Approach and implementation:

We will simulate many forest management alternatives and then apply multi-objective optimization (MOO) to identify the paths that fulfil objectives. This MOO will include harvest and forest variables, ES, biodiversity and climate impact assessment based on LCA. We will also investigate uncertainties and sensitivities of results to LCA assumptions. Finally, we optimize the forestry to reach targets specified on harvests, climate change mitigation, FES delivery and biodiversity conservation.