C I N T R A F O R
Special Paper Abstract
Forest Sector, Trade and Environmental Impact Models: Theory and Applications:
Proceedings of an International Symposium.
D.Adams, R. Haynes, B. Lippke, J. Perez-Garcia, Comp., 1992 (237pp) SP11 $20.00
While the ongoing research by many of you has been the driving force behind most of the papers, the program has been organized around six areas, making sure there would be new insights offered in theme papers in each area. We duly noted that we were not overwhelmed with environmental linkage modeling papers. Perhaps this conference, with its historic background of economic spatial equilibrium modeling, is more intimidating to environmental researchers than the popular press, which characteristically lays out solutions in 20 second sound bytes or one page, whichever is shorter. The environmental linkage chains are quite long and will require more lengthy research and modeling efforts.
Our keynote address by UBC Department of Forestry Dean Clark Binkley will lay out the challenge of the future. Just what is this task of understanding the economics of trade, production and environmental linkages in a global context?
Then we can get some flavor of where we are with our first set of papers on the theme of modeling environmental impacts with forest sector models. Linda Joyce and Richard Haynes of the USFS will show how they are integrating resource projections with timber projections. John Perez-Garcia, of CINTRAFOR, will then outline what we might call the holistic approach to environmental impact modeling. If each stage of the competitive global trade model characterizes the economic decisions from growth to processing, consumption and disposal of our renewable resources each economic stage can also be linked to their environmental measures such that we could deliver a fairly complete set of environmental measures consistent with economic measures.
As if detail alone were not enough of a problem, there are problems with substitution. The use of non-renewable resources and marginal versus average representations concern more than a few of us.
In our second session of papers, we will bring ourselves up to date on forest sector regional models and their applications. We certainly can not say that all of yesterday's modeling problems have been put to rest
Darcie Booth, Mark Messmer and Douglas H. Williams with Forestry Canada, will report on Canadian timber supply modeling efforts. Peter Ince with the USES, Don Roberts and Romain Jacques with Forestry Canada will look at the impacts of accelerated paper recycling in the context of US timber supply and pulp and paper models. Pushing towards environmental applications, Runar Brannlund and Bengt Kristrom, University of Umea, Sweden, will characterize the impact of environmental charges with their Swedish Forest Sector model. Xiaoming Yu, University of Tennessee, and Kishine Takuro, Bukkyo University, Japan will describe their model for coordination of environmental and economic policies.
In Session III, modeling issues involving environmental impacts related to forest management policy are linked to non-commodity outputs. Richard Birdsey, with the USFS, will characterize impacts of forest management policy on carbon storage in US forests. Clark Row, a consulting resource economist, will discuss the post-harvest impacts on carbon flows and sinks. Davide Pettenella and Luca Cesaro, from the Universita Degli Studi Di Padova, Italy, bring an international focus on carbon accounting and policy impacts. JR. de Steiguer and P. M. Dougherty,
US Forest Service, finishes this session with some estimates of the probable economic and biological impacts of global climate change on the timber markets in the southeast
The fact that national and global models give different solutions to many questions, as one is free to substitute global resources where the other does not, may not really be a research or a modeling problem. It still represents a paradigm if the questions being asked are link with the global forest sector. Similarly, if the questions require linkages that will impact technology transfer, a national or global sector paradigm may be adequate. Yield, utilization and value-added technological changes are economically driven and important. We were hoping for solutions to modeling technology implementation and the non-homogeneity of producers but have settled for noting these problems here and following the lead of current research that will fill in some of the pressing needs of forest sector modeling.
Session IV examines the impacts of technology and market changes on modeling industry wood and non-wood substitution. Lars Lonnstedt, from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Don Roberts, Darcie Booth and Susan Phelps, Forestry Canada, present their analysis of the impacts of recycling on the Canadian newsprint industry. New insights on the demand for wood composites is presented by Thomas Marcin, USFS. Methods to measure technological changes and capacity expansions in the North American pulp and paper industry are discussed by Dali Zhang and Joseph Buongiorno, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Finally, in this session, Brian Murray, US Forest Service, Robert Abt, from North Carolina State University. Don Roberts and Jamie Brunet, from Forestry Canada discuss productivity measures in an inter-regional analysis of the North American Forest Products Sectors.
It is important to understand what the practical contributions science and modeling can provide. Session IV addresses this theme from several perspectives. Jeffrey Vincent, Harvard University, has this task from a developing countries perspective. Narendra Sharma, from the World Bank, shares his experience on forest utilization and environmental issues.
And finally a provocative discussion about the future by some of those who have been key players along the way and were able to make the discussion one of the high points of previous symposia Maybe a post-symposium paper can be developed out of the future directions panel, made up of Clark Binkley (UBC), Phil Wardle (FAO), Dale Kalbfleisch (Weyerhaeuser), Lars Lonnstedt (Sweden), and Rodger Sedjo (RFF).