European Forests and Carbon Sequestration Services: An Economic Assessment of Climate Change Impacts

26 Pages Posted: 23 Feb 2010

See all articles by Helen Ding

Helen Ding

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)

Paulo A. L. D. Nunes

University of Padua - Dipartimento Territorio e Sistemi Agro Forestali (TeSAF)

Sonja S. Teelucksingh

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Date Written: February 23, 2010

Abstract

This paper reports an original economic valuation of the impact of climate change on the provision of forest regulating services in Europe. To the authors’ knowledge the current paper represents the first systematic attempt to estimate human well-being losses with respect to changes in biodiversity and forest regulating services that are directly driven by climate change. First, selected 34 European countries are grouped by their latitude intervals to capture the differentiated regional effects of forests in response to climate change. Moreover, the future trends of forest areas and stocked carbon in 2050 are projected through the construction and simulation of global circulation models such as HADMC3 following four different future developing paths described by the four IPCC scenarios. Finally, the valuation exercise is anchored in an ecosystem service based approach, involving the use of general circulation models and integrated assessment models. Our findings address two dimensions in the evaluation of climate impacts on European forests: Firstly, future projections yield different states of the world depending upon the IPCC scenario adopted. Secondly, spatial issues matter in an assessment of the distributional impacts of climate change, as these impacts are not distributed in a uniform way across the European countries under consideration.

Keywords: Economic Valuation, Forest Ecosystem, Carbon Sequestration, Climate Change Impacts

JEL Classification: Q23, Q51, Q57

Suggested Citation

Ding, Helen and Dias Nunes, Paulo Augusto and Teelucksingh, Sonja S., European Forests and Carbon Sequestration Services: An Economic Assessment of Climate Change Impacts (February 23, 2010). FEEM Working Paper No. 10.2010, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1557689 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1557689

Helen Ding

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) ( email )

Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore
Venice, 30124
Italy
+39 041 2700436 (Phone)
+39 041 2700413 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.feem.it/Feem/default.htm

Paulo Augusto Dias Nunes (Contact Author)

University of Padua - Dipartimento Territorio e Sistemi Agro Forestali (TeSAF) ( email )

Legnaro, Padova 35020
Italy

Sonja S. Teelucksingh

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei ( email )

Campo S. M. Formosa, Castello 5252
Venezia, 30122
Italy

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