Adapting forests and their management to climate change: an overview

Unasylva 231/232, Vol. 60, 2009 Forest adaptation to future environmental or social conditions resulting from climate change may significantly alter how and why forestry is practised in many parts of the globe. With the climate, and as a result the environment, undergoing perceptible changes within the life span of trees, achieving sustainable forest management will increasingly resemble aiming at a moving target. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) has concluded that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and most likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. In addition to the rise in average global temperatures, discernable changes have been observed in day, night and seasonal temperatures, in the frequency, duration and intensities of heat waves, droughts and floods, wind and storm patterns, frost, snow and ice cover, and in global sea levels. Anthropogenic warming has already caused many changes in forests. As large, extensively managed, long-lived ecosystems, often on marginal sites, forests respond sensitively to climatic changes, together with the people, societies and economic activities that depend on them. IPCC rated boreal, mountain (see article by Maroschek et al., this issue), Mediterranean, mangrove and tropical moist forests as the forest ecosystems most likely affected by climate change. Forests also influence climate change, as sources of greenhouse gases when they are destroyed and as sinks for carbon when they grow or expand. The Bali Action Plan adopted by the thirteenth Adapting forests and their management to climate change: an overview