ORCHIDEE_CAN_r3069

This version of ORCHIDEE has been used in Tradeoffs in using European forests to meet climate objectives by Sebastiaan Luyssaert, Guillaume Marie, Aude Valade, Yi-Ying Chen, Sylvestre Njakou Djomo, James Ryder, Juliane Otto, Kim Naudts, Anne Sofie Lansø, Josefine Ghattas, and Matthew J. McGrath. Nature, 562: 259-... ​https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0577-1.

Abstract

The Paris Agreement contains the implicit assumption that enhancing the forest sector carbon sink through sustainable forest management and biomass usage will result in climate benefits. Here, we use simulation experiments to search for portfolios of sustainable forest management that, by the turn of the 21st-century, comply with the Paris Agreement, i.e., reduce the growth rate of atmospheric CO2, reduce the radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, and neither increase the near-surface air temperature nor decrease precipitation in comparison to a business-as-usual portfolio. We found that the portfolios that maximise the carbon sink, maximise the forest albedo or the opposite, minimise forest albedo, pass only one criterion, albeit different, out of four criteria. Managing the European forests with the objective to reduce near-surface air temperature will also reduce the atmospheric CO2 growth rate, thus meeting two out of four criteria. The portfolio that minimises the sectorial carbon sink fails all criteria. Based on these findings we argue that the primary role of forest management should be in adapting the forest cover to future climate in order to provide valuable economic, social, and cultural benefits while avoiding positive climate feedbacks from fire, wind, pests and drought disturbances. Even if adaptation would require large-scale changes in species composition and silvicultural systems over Europe, these changes themselves are likely to have little climate impact. Once present-day forest cover is sustained, our simulations indicate, however, that additional climate benefits through forest management would be modest and local rather than global; this suggests a more complex relationship between forest management and climate change mitigation than commonly considered.

Code access

• See the version on the webinterface here : ​https://forge.ipsl.fr/orchidee/browser/branches/publications/ORCHIDEE_CAN_r3069
• Extract it on a terminal as follow, type anonymous as password:

  svn co --username anonymous svn://forge.ipsl.fr/orchidee/branches/publications/ORCHIDEE_CAN_r3069 ORCHIDEE
  

Metadata

DOI	​http://dx.doi.org/10.14768/06337394-73A9-407C-9997-0E380DAC5596
Creator	Sebastiaan Luyssaert
Affiliation	VU Amsterdam
Title	ORCHIDEE_CAN revision 3069
Publisher	Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL)
PublicationYear	2018
ResourceType	Software
Rights	This software is distributed under the CeCILL license
rightsURI	​http://www.cecill.info/
Subject	Land surface model, Forest management, canopy representation
DataManager	Karim Ramage (IPSL)
DataCurator	Josefine Ghattas (IPSL)
ContactPerson	Sebastiaan Luyssaert (VU Amsterdam)
FundingReference	ERC starting grant 242564 (DOFOCO), ADEME (BiCaFF) and Amsterdam Academic Alliance (AAA) fellowship