INTEGRATING CLIMATIC-CHANGE AND FORESTS - ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGIC ASSESSMENTS

Effective policies for dealing with anticipated climatic changes must reflect the two-way interactions between climate, forests and society. Considerable analysis has focused on one aspect of forests - timber p roduction - at a local and regional scale, but no fully integrated glo bal studies have been conducted. The appropriate ecological and econom ic models appear to be available to do so. Nontimber aspects of forest s dominate the social values provided by many forests, especially remo te or unmanaged lands where the impacts of climatic change are apt to be most significant. Policy questions related to these issues and land s are much less well understood. Policy options related to afforestati on are well studied, but other ways the forest sector can help amelior ate climatic change merit more extensive analysis. Promising possibili ties include carbon taxes to influence the management of extant forest s, and materials policies to lengthen the life of wood products or to encourage the substitution of CO2-fixing wood products for ones manufa ctured from less benign materials.