Climate Change and Forests
Brent Sohngen
Abstract
Forests have become an important carbon sink in the last century, with management and carbon fertilization offsetting nearly all of the carbon emitted due to deforestation and conversion of land into agricultural uses. Society appears already to have decided that forests will play an equally ambitious role in the future. Given this, economists are needed to help better understand the efficiency of efforts society may undertake to expand forests, protect them from losses, manage them more intensively, or convert them into wood products, including biomass energy. A rich literature exists on this topic, but a number of critical information gaps persist, representing important opportunities for economists to advance knowledge in the future. This article reviews the literature on forests and climate change and provides some thoughts on potential future research directions.