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Sohngen, Brent; Haynes, Richard W.

doi:10.1023/a:1005311308790

Cited by 23 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Adding fire exclusion to the analyses did little to increase the rate of carbon accumulation in forests. Similar results were found by Sohngen & Haynes (1997). They calculated that a 5% increase in fire suppression would increase the future carbon sink in US forests by only 0.5 TgC/year.…”

Section: The Net Flux Of Carbon From Fire and The Exclusion Of Firesupporting

confidence: 80%

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Changes in terrestrial carbon storage in the United States. 2: The role of fire and fire management

Houghton

Hackler

Lawrence

2000

Global Ecology and Biogeography

128

104

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Areas burned annually in the United States between 1700 and 1990 were derived from published estimates of pre‐European burning rates and from wildfire statistics of the US Forest Service. Changes in live and dead vegetation following fire and fire exclusion were determined for 18 types of biomes and added to a book‐keeping model to calculate the long‐term effect of fire and fire management on carbon storage. Over the 290‐year period, burning declined by an estimated 98%, first, because wildlands were converted to agricultural lands, essentially eliminating fire from 236 × 106 ha and, secondly, because wildfires were excluded and suppressed in the remaining forests and non‐forests. Adding fire and fire management to an analysis of land‐use change (companion paper) reduced the emissions of carbon over the period 1700–1990 by 25% (8 PgC). Less carbon was released because fire reduced the average biomass of forests cleared and burned, and because fire exclusion led to an increase in carbon storage in forests. The wildfire statistics of the USDA were insufficient for addressing two kinds of change: fire exclusion before 1926 and changes in the burning of non‐forest ecosystems. We estimate here that as much as 4 and 12 PgC, respectively, may have accumulated in vegetation as a result of these changes, but the estimates are uncertain and likely to be upper limits. The maximum rate of carbon accumulation attributable to all changes in land use, including fire management, was 300–400 TgC/year and occurred around 1980. Less than half of this uptake was in forests. Uptake by forests was constrained by the fact that most forests were already accumulating carbon in response to earlier harvests. Fire exclusion added little to this uptake.

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Section: The Net Flux Of Carbon From Fire and The Exclusion Of Firesupporting

confidence: 80%

“…In 1990, it was 37% lower than the estimates used here for fully grown primary forests (137 MgC/ha). The difference between potential and current biomass suggests that today’s forests might serve as carbon sinks if rates of harvest are reduced ( Brown et al, 1997 ; Sohngen & Haynes, 1997) and if fires continue to be suppressed.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in terrestrial carbon storage in the United States. 2: The role of fire and fire management

Houghton

Hackler

Lawrence

2000

Global Ecology and Biogeography

128

104

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“…Climate change is expected to also affect background tree mortality, growth, species ranges, as well as other forest disturbances, which may in addition interact with wildfires (Lindner et al, 2010b;Seidl et al, 2017). Previous forest sector model-based assessments have been dedicated to such issues, both for France (Caurla et al, 2015;Delacote, Lobianco, et al, 2021;Petucco et al, 2019) and other regions (Hanewinkel et al, 2013;Sohngen & Haynes, 1997;Tian et al, 2016), and a significant future challenge resides in their integration.…”

Section: Study Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bioeconomic Projection of Climate‐Induced Wildfire Risk in the Forest Sector

et al. 2022

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Under the influence of climate change, wildfire regimes are expected to intensify and expand to new areas, increasing threats to natural and socioeconomic assets. We explore the environmental and economic implications for the forest sector of climate‐induced changes in wildfire regimes. To retain genericity while considering local determinants, we focus on the regional level and take Mediterranean France as an example. Coupling a bioeconomic forest sector model and a model of wildfire activity, we perform spatially explicit simulations under various levels of radiative forcing. By using a probabilistic framework, we also assess the propagation of several sources of uncertainty to the forest sector, considering both climate‐induced uncertainty and the intrinsic stochasticity of the fire process. By the end of the century, summer burned areas increase by up to 55%, causing moderate losses of merchantable timber and forest carbon stocks, with cascading impacts for industrial activities and climate mitigation in the forest sector. Implications for industries remain limited, but we observe price increases, especially for softwoods, as well as spatially differentiated changes in producer welfare. Inter‐annual fluctuations explain most of uncertainty in wildfire activity, but their impacts on the forest sector are quickly dampened. Over time, owing to the cumulative nature of wildfire impacts on forest resources, uncertainty related to climate warming, climate models’ response and stochasticity intrinsic to the wildfire phenomenon strongly increase in relative importance. Results reassert the need to consider multiple futures in prospective assessments, including uncertainty inherent to natural processes, often omitted in large‐scale economic assessments.

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