Torgny Lind

Interactions Between Forest Owners and Their Forests

More than half of the forest land in Europe is privately owned, and ownership structure is known to have implications for management, production of timber and other forest products and services that support the transformation towards a green economy. This chapter provides examples of how we can gain knowledge about the forest and forest owner/user relationship from a structural point of view. Sweden is taken as an example because of the accessibility of continuous data on forest conditions, ownership and demographic data. It is concluded that the pace of change in ownership structure and forest management behaviour is slow. Further, neither the ongoing migration, urbanisation, ageing population nor the increased proportion of women seems to reduce the willingness to manage and harvest.

Considering costs and revenues in long‐term forecasts of timber yields

In Sweden, long‐term forecasts of timber yields have traditionally dealt with the production of timber, without consideration of costs and revenues. A system for long‐term forecasting (HUGIN) has been further developed with incorporation of calculations of costs for logging and silviculture together with revenues from timber and pulp wood. The forecasts of HUGIN are based on sample plot data from the Swedish National Forest Inventory. After the specification of alternative silviculture and logging programs in HUGIN, the user can study costs, revenues and number of man‐days for each program. By using quality functions and price lists, the HUGIN system calculates the highest possible revenue for the individual tree by optimizing the division into assortments. The HUGIN system will be improved further in the future to include calculations of road transport costs, improved quality functions and revenues from other forest resources than timber.

Steps Towards Integrating Carbon Dioxide Sources and Sinks into Local Environmental Planning

Anthropogenic carbon dioxide balancing can be evaluated by counting the amount of emissions and the sinks that absorb and release carbon. Local level planning can affect the emission-sinks balance. However when trying to meet international goals, it seems that local government mainly considers emission reduction and not sink losses. This paper investigates the implications of using carbon dioxide emissions and forest ecosystems as sinks in Swedish municipal planning. The results demonstrate how emission reduction can be offset by the losses in sinks derived by land use and transportation planning. This moves local government further away from achieving the national emission reduction goal. The results also show a potential for carbon trading between municipalities.