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Abstract:
Forests mitigate climate change by storing carbon and reducing emissions via substitution
effects of wood products. Additionally, they provide many other important ecosystem services (ESs), but are
vulnerable to climate change; therefore, adaptation is necessary. Climate-smart forestry combines mitigation
with adaptation, whilst facilitating the provision of many ESs. This is particularly challenging due to large
uncertainties about future climate. Here, we combined ecosystem modeling with robust multi-criteria
optimization to assess how the provision of various ESs (climate change mitigation, timber provision, local
cooling, water availability, and biodiversity habitat) can be guaranteed under a broad range of climate futures
across Europe. Our optimized portfolios contain 29% unmanaged forests, and implicate a successive conversion
of 34% of coniferous to broad-leaved forests (11% vice versa). Coppices practically vanish from Southern
Europe, mainly due to their high water requirement. We find the high shares of unmanaged forests necessary
to keep European forests a carbon sink while broad-leaved and unmanaged forests contribute to local cooling
through biogeophysical effects. Unmanaged forests also pose the largest benefit for biodiversity habitat.
However, the increased shares of unmanaged and broad-leaved forests lead to reductions in harvests. This raises
the question of how to meet increasing wood demands without transferring ecological impacts elsewhere or
enhancing the dependence on more carbon-intensive industries. Furthermore, the mitigation potential of forests
depends on assumptions about the decarbonization of other industries and is consequently crucially dependent
on the emission scenario. Our findings highlight that trade-offs must be assessed when developing concrete
strategies for climate-smart forestry.
