Since the Industrial Revolution, mankind was developed based on fossil fuels. GHGs have increased significantly due to social and economic activities in this process.
On the other hand, the forest absorbs and stores CO2 through photosynthesis, thereby preventing global warming and affects the temperature and humidity in region scale. These forests provide us with diverse ecosystem services, such as climate regulation services in the regulation services, have a mitigation effect that affects not only the local climate but also the global climate, including the absorption of greenhouse gases. Korea government aims at a policy to increase the CO2 storage of forests in order to establish the Post-2020, which was discussed at the COP21 in December 2015.
The purpose of this study is 1) to clarify the effects of future climate change on net primary productivity of forest under the scenarios considering social economic change and 2) to estimate the damage cost of forest in the future.
For this purpose, we conducted as follows: 1) selecting variables for the evaluation of forest productivity through literature review, 2) estimating the present and future net primary productivity of forest by using statistical models, and 3) estimating the damage cost using benefit transfer method.
Results/Conclusions
The present net primary productivity of forest was 63,205,142 tC/yr, which was 60,903,216 tC/yr in the 2050s and 65,114,608 tC/yr in the 2100s. The results show that net primary productivity of forest decreased in the 2050s and increased in the 2100s. It is assumed that this result is caused by the increase of the NDVI value, and the reason for the increase of the NDVI is that the precipitation is increased. It is presumed that net primary productivity of forest will be high in southern and central inland areas in the future, and net primary productivity of forest will be also relatively low in high altitude areas.
To derive the benefit-transfer function, the benefits of the forest were derived through literature reviews. The average value of forest was 75.0 thousand USD/km2, provision service was 60.0 thousand USD/km2, regulation service was 864.8 thousand USD/km2, supporting service was 80.1 thousand USD/km2, and cultural service was 30.4 thousand USD/km2. The cost of damages is expected to be about from 3.2 billion USD to 4.3 billion USD in the 2050s. This is about 0.3% of GDP, but the value would be underestimated considering the non-use value which is bigger than the use value.