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Over recent decades forest management has recognized the fact that forests provide a wide variety of services besides timber, such as carbon sequestration and the preservation of biodiversity. During this time, science has found significant evidence that climate change is actually taking place. Since the change in climatic conditions will affect the vital cycle of trees, the optimal management of forests needs to be adapted to these new conditions to make the best use of forests from the social point of view. From the policy side, forest management is confronted with the task of balancing the objectives of competitiveness, compliance with international agreements with respect to climate change mitigation and the preservation of biodiversity. This study aims to analyze the optimal management regime of forests under changing climatic conditions, taking timber, carbon and biodiversity into account. It finds that the objectives of carbon sequestration and biodiversity should target different stands. The cost of the latter can be reduced substantially if only mature stands are pursued and not young stands.

They are an important economic resource, and a source of food products, recreation, species habitat, and watershed protection, among many other services. Forests also may store large quantities of carbon. The threat of climate change therefore provides new impetus for forest management, in the form of forest carbon sequestration (FCS). FCS appears to be a relatively cheap way of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, relative to alternatives such as fuel switching. But FCS is not without problems. Economists' estimates of the cost-effectiveness of FCS are highly variable. Verification is difficult. And policy design is complex — not only because of the characteristics of forests themselves, but because of the limitations of current U.S. policy. Existing regulatory tools — predominantly the Clean Air Act — are largely incompatible in providing incentives for FCS. This paper explores the current state of FCS knowledge, including its policy context, and identifies an agenda for future research.

In the Durban climate change conference of UNFCCC in 2011 new accounting rules were agreed for forest sector in Annex I countries to provide incentives for forest management and emission mitigation. There was also pressure to modify accounting rules to avoid giving credits for sequestration which would occur naturally. New accounting rules are based on reference levels against which greenhouse gas emissions and sinks resulting from forest management are compared during the second commitment period (2013–2020) of the Kyoto Protocol. In this study we investigate the timber market impacts and the effectiveness of the reference level policy in promoting forest management actions in the EU countries. We also study how setting of caps for policy-based gains affects the effectiveness of the policy. We found that the policy enhances carbon sequestration, if it is implemented in such a way that it affects harvests. The market impacts and the effects on forest sinks can be substantial in countries where non-LULUCF sector emissions are high relative to the potential of forest resources to act as sinks. In smaller countries with relatively large forest resources, the effectiveness of the policy is dampened by upper limits imposed on the emission compensations. The results of our study can be used to improve the effectiveness of policies in climate change negotiations.

Natural climate solutions offer the promise of low-cost carbon mitigation together with the provision of additional ecosystem services. We provide new estimates of the cost of increasing carbon storage in the forests of Western Oregon and Washington using forest management. Relative to previous studies that focus on lengthening timber rotations, we emphasize the importance of silvicultural treatments, in particular, pre-commercial and commercial thinning. We find the lowest average costs — in the range of $13–18/MT CO₂e — when commercial thinning is combined with longer rotations and discount rates are relatively low. Across the ranges of management scenarios and discount rates we consider, the majority of forest lands in the region can generate carbon offsets at prices below $40/MT CO₂e, the current allowance price in California’s carbon market. When carbon flows are valued at the Social Cost of Carbon, benefits from forest management greatly exceed the costs.

In May 2017, Department of Science, Technology and Standards, MEP, China held the first training conference of “2017 CCUS environmental risk assessment technology”. After the conference, specially designed questionnaires were sent to the participants so as to collect the professional opinions to improve the guideline in the next revision. Basic information of participants, knowledge of capture, utilization and geological storage (CCUS), and attitude to the CCUS environmental risk are contained in the questionnaires. The 82 questionnaires were issued to the participants, and 77 valid questionnaires were collected with the response rate of 93.9%. According to the data mining, (a) nearly one third of the participants had not heard of the CCUS before the training; (b) the attitude to CCUS environmental impact and risk is influenced by the knowledge of CCUS; (c) the severities of the three aspects of capture component are medium; (d) for onshore CCUS projects, underground water, atmosphere, soil, and human health were considered the highest sensitivity receptors; (e) the enterprises were very concerned of the CCUS environmental management policies, three most important policies were conducting environmental monitoring across the whole chain, clarifying the environmental management responsibilities, and establishing emergency plans for environmental accidents. The result of this survey would provide the guidance for the improvement of the technical guideline which planned to be released during the official version in 2020.

Carbon dioxide is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and its influence on the atmosphere is becoming more of a concern. Several sources of natural carbon dioxide emission and mitigation exist such as organism respiration and decomposition and forest fires as well as mitigation controls by sequestering from foliage and absorption from oceans. Anthropogenic sources include energy production from fossil fuels, industrial production and agricultural production, and have been adding to atmospheric levels at an exponential rate. Several processes to help mitigate carbon dioxide include capturing, separation and storage. This paper covers a review of carbon dioxide emissions and mitigation practices.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and convert it into organic matter, which is stored in the plant body as well as in the soil and water environment. This process is called carbon sequestration. Proper tree cutting is beneficial to achieve more carbon sequestration in a certain period of time. The purpose of this paper is to use modern computer algorithms to find the balance between the amount of deforestation and the maximum carbon sequestration and maximum benefit through mathematical modeling, and to give a more reasonable and universal forest management plan to balance and maximize the carbon sequestration benefits, economic benefits, and ecological benefits of forests.

Mangrove wetlands are significant coastal wetland ecosystems. With their rich diversity of flora and fauna, they have huge potential for landscape building and ecological development in a given area. Started in 2011, the urban mangrove wetland ecological park construction project in Xia-Tan-Wei, Xiamen, China uses ecological engineering methods. A new design concept “crop circling” has been successfully applied in mangrove landscape building in the first phase of the project. The second phase of the project plan not only considers mangrove park landscape planning, but also the design of seagrass beds and oyster aquaculture, which will be constructed on low-lying mudflats in order to build a biological carbon sequestration and eco-development base.

Carbon sequestration through forestry has the potential to play a significant role in ameliorating global environmental problems such as atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases and climate change. This chapter provides an overview of various aspects related to carbon sequestration through forestry. It describes the main concepts of carbon fixation; the trends in global environmental policy are discussed; different forestry practices are listed; and examples of existing projects are given. The paper also discusses issues related to the quantification of carbon sequestration potential of different forestry options. This section was included with the intention of specifically highlighting some problems related to commercial transactions for carbon sequestration.