Brent Sohngen

Consideration of country and forestry/ land‐use characteristics in choosing forestry instruments to achieve climate mitigation goals

Abstract To implement effective carbon sequestration policies policymakers must analyze key characteristics of the country (geographic, institutional, economic, and infrastructural factors) and forestry and land‐use practices (the degree of risk associated with investment, the relative difficulty in measuring sequestration, and the degree of discretion allowed). Without careful analysis of this type, policies may have unintended negative effects.

The economics of global timber markets. Final report

This paper develops a global timber market model which captures how timber supply reacts to future predicted increases in the demand for timber. Higher future demand is expected to increase prices, reflecting greater land scarcity. Investments in growing timber are also expected to increase, expanding output and tempering the price response. A greater reliance on plantations in productive regions is predicted to allow large areas of natural forest in low valued regions to remain largely intact. The quantitative results are sensitive to the rate demand increases, the cost of plantations, and access costs of natural forests.

A dynamic model of forest carbon storage in the united states during climatic change

Abstract As carbon dioxide increases and climate changes over the next century, will ecosystems react by storing more carbon or by releasing it? While many ecosystem models predict that natural forest systems ultimately will store more carbon, transient scenarios predict that they will release carbon during the transition. In this paper, we integrate ecosystem and management responses to a climate scenario and predict that increased amounts of carbon will be stored in both the short run and the long run. These increases will come from two areas: adaptive responses of forest managers and carbon storage within the economic system.