Ecosystems store approximately 1 trillion tons of CO2 in the biomass of living trees and plants. Methods to increase this carbon efficiently in order to reduce the future damages of climate change include afforestation (planting old agricultural land in trees), reduced deforestation, and forest management.
Prof. Brent Sohngen notes current estimates that suggest an additional 6.8 billion tons CO2 per year may be sequestered in forests by 2030 for $30 per ton CO2.
Around 42% of this would arise from avoided deforestation, with the rest roughly equally split between afforestation and forest management options.
Sohngen indicates that if society follows an “optimal” carbon abatement policy, as defined in Nordhaus (2009), forestry could accomplish roughly 30% of total abatement over the century.
If society instead places strict limits on emissions in order to meet a 2ºC temperature increase limitation, then the component forestry provides lowers overall abatement costs by as much as 50%.
The benefit cost ratio in the optimal scenario is 1.0, while it is 1.8 in the 2ºC limiting case.
The paper does not account for other potential benefits of adding forestland over time. These benefits are ecological in nature, and they are difficult to measure systematically across the globe. They do, however, represent a potentially large, additional, benefit of a forestry carbon sequestration program
Dr Sabine Fuss is in broad agreement with Prof. Brent Sohngen’s analysis of costs and benefits associated with the climate change mitigation options offered by forest carbon sequestration. She summarizes the assessment paper’s approach and conclusions, highlights the most important findings, and identifies gaps and their implications for the calculations. Fuss's conclusion coincides with the findings of Sohngen, who claims that forest carbon will be needed as part of a strategy to mitigate climate change.
Analysis Papers, written by experts in this field, provide a comprehensive exploration of the costs and benefits of one solution to climate change.
Perspective Papers provide a critique of the assumptions and calculations used in the Analysis Paper, and provide another expert opinion on this solution to climate change.
Download PDFProf. Brent Sohngen
Author of An Analysis of Forestry as a Response to Climate Change. Brent Sohngen is Professor at The Ohio State University's Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, and University Fellow at Resources For the Future. Professor Sohngen develops economic models of land-use and land-cover change for climate policy analysis, and he studies the economics of non-point source pollution control.
