The impact of changing wildfire regimes on wood availability from portuguese forests

This article belongs to the special issue: Fire policies and practices in Europe: solving the Fire ParadoxThe perception of the good capability of the Portuguese mainland for timber production has sustained forest expansion policies during the twentieth century. These policies led to an increase of production forests, maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) first and eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) later to support establishment and development of wood based industries (sawn, pulp and paper). The most recent forest inventory from 2005/6 estimated an area of 885,000 ha for maritime pine (8.9% of the country) and 740,000 ha for eucalyptus (7.5%). Today wood based industries (sawn, pulp and paper) are important for jobs and economy, using essentially the raw material produced in the country. However, forests are at high risks of wildfires, with pine and eucalyptus burning at an annual rate of 3–4% between 1996 and 2005. This resulted in great concerns about the sustainability of the national supply of wood to forest industries. As a consequence the National Forest Strategy (DGRF, 2007) recognized the decrease of risks associated with wildfires as a main policy objective. We predict the effect of different wildfire scenarios on wood availability for pine and eucalyptus forests with Markov chain models, by using national forest inventory and wildfire data

Cork stoppers supply chain: potential scenarios for environmental impact reduction

The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the environmental impacts deriving from the production of natural cork stoppers in Portugal, in order to identify the most significant stages and processes (hotspots) and to suggest improvement actions and alternative scenarios. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is used by applying a cradle-to-bottling approach. This approach includes the stages of forest management (not considered in related LCA studies), cork preparation, natural cork stoppers production, finishing and distribution to the bottling locations. The results show that the forest management stage has the largest contribution to the environmental impact of natural cork stoppers in the majority of the impact categories. More specifically, the greatest influence derives from the operations of pruning and spontaneous vegetation cleaning. Additionally, the preparation stage and the production stage influence two impact categories each, while the finishing stage is the hotspot in one impact category. These contributions are mainly caused by the energy requirements of these stages. The total environmental impacts may be decreased by 3%–65% if maintenance pruning operations are not performed and simultaneously cleaning operations are undertaken by rotary mowers instead of disc harrows in the forest management stage. Changes in the production stage, such as decreasing the transport distance between the preparation and the production factory or the use of a combination of manual and mechanical punching, do not show great influence in the total environmental impact.publishe