Addressing Carbon Storage in Forested Landscape Management Planning—An Optimization Approach and Application in Northwest Portugal

Abstract

Climate change is driving worldwide efforts to mitigate and reverse the increasing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Forests can uptake considerable amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, but management decisions and resultant silvicultural practices can largely influence these ecosystems’ carbon balance. This research presents an approach to help land managers cope with the need to ensure the provision of forest products and services while contributing to mitigating climate change via carbon sequestration. The emphasis is on combining a landscape-level resource capability model with a mathematical programming (LP) optimization method to model and solve a land management problem involving timber production, carbon sequestration, and resistance to wildfire targets. The results of an application on a forested landscape in Northwest Portugal showed that this approach may contribute to analyzing and discussing synergies and trade-offs between these targets. They revealed important trade-offs between carbon sequestration and both timber production and fire resistance.