Dynamics of Fully Stocked Stands in the Territory of the Former Soviet Union

IIASA, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Russian governmental organizations initiated the Siberian Forest Study in 1992, with the following objectives: Identification of possible future sustainable development options for the Siberian forest sector (assess the biosphere role of Siberian forests, and identify suitable strategies for sustainable development of forest resources, industry, infrastructure, and society); Identification of policies for various options to be implemented by Russian and international agencies. The first phase of the study built relevant and consistent databases for the upcoming analyses of the Siberian forest sector (Phase II). Nine cornerstone areas have been identified for the assessment analyses, namely, further development of the databases, greenhouse gas balances, forest resources and forest utilization, biodiversity and landscapes, non-wood functions, environmental status, forest industry and markets, transportation infrastructure, and socioeconomics. The existing increment estimations in the former USSR and Russia are limited to net increment calculations for periods between inventories which are aggregated for groups of species. Thus, the so called average increment as presented in the Forest State Account is an accumulative characteristic of the growing stock. The work in this paper presents a system developed to estimate the gross and net increment as well as the natural mortality for major forest species by ecoregion. In this report, the work dealing with evenaged fully stocked stands is presented. In the future, analyses for different stocking densities and different types of age structures will be carried out. This work on increment and mortality is a crucial step for the further analyses of the greenhouse gas balances, forest resources and forest utilization, and biodiversity and landscapes in cornerstones in phase 11

Evolution of seaports of the Russian Far East in relation to changes in the energy structure in Pacific Asia

We estimated the current state of seaports Vanino and Sovetskaya Gavan, situated in the Russian Far East, as beneficiaries to themselves (at local scale), to Khabarovsk Krai (regional or provincial scale) and to the Russian Federation (inter-regional or federal scale). Further, we make projections for the near future (until the year 2030) for conditions of current export fuel supply demands in China and for conditions of climate-friendly energy restructuring in China. It is shown that the coal specialization of Vanino and Sovetskaya Gavan seaports will not be profitable in the near future (year 2030) for conditions of climate-friendly energy restructuring in China. There will be considerable economic losses at the national level if coal specialization is persistent. Thus, environmental policies regarding energy structure in a country with a large economy may sufficiently influence the development of transport, industry and urban infrastructure on an inter-regional, regional or local level for a country importing fuel resources.</p

Scenarios of demographic distributional aspects of health co-benefits from decarbonising urban transport

Background There is limited knowledge on the distribution of the health co-benefits of reduced air pollutants and carbon emissions in the transport sector across populations. Methods This Article describes a health impact assessment used to estimate the health co-benefits of alternative land passenger transport scenarios for the city of Beijing, China, testing the effect of five transport-based scenarios from 2020 to 2050 on health outcomes. New potential scenarios range from implementing a green transport infrastructure, to scenarios primarily based on the electrification of vehicle fleets and a deep decarbonisation scenario with near zero carbon emissions by 2050. The health co-benefits are disaggregated by age and sex and estimated in monetary terms. Findings The results show that all the alternative mitigation scenarios result in reduced PM2·5 and CO2 emissions compared to a business-as-usual scenario during 2020–50. The near zero scenario achieves the largest health co-benefits and economic benefits annually relative to the sole mitigation strategy, preventing 300 (95% CI 229–450) deaths, with health co-benefits and CO2 cost-saving an equivalent of 0·01% (0·00–0·03%) of Beijing's Gross domestic product in 2015 by 2050. Given Beijing's ageing population and higher mortality rate, individuals aged 50 years and older experience the greatest benefit from the mitigation scenarios. Regarding sex, the greatest health benefits occur in men. Interpretation This assessment provides estimates of the demographic distribution of benefits from the effects of combinations of green transport and decarbonising vehicles in transport futures. The results show that there are substantial positive health outcomes from decarbonising transport in Beijing. Policies aimed at encouraging active travel and use of public transport, increasing the safety of active travel, improving public transport infrastructure, and decarbonising vehicles lead to differential benefits. In addition, disaggregation by age and sex shows that the health impacts related to transport pollution disproportionately influence different age cohorts and genders

The role of historical fire disturbance in the carbon dynamics of the pan-boreal region : a process-based analysis

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007): G02029, doi:10.1029/2006JG000380.Wildfire is a common occurrence in ecosystems of northern high latitudes, and changes in the fire regime of this region have consequences for carbon feedbacks to the climate system. To improve our understanding of how wildfire influences carbon dynamics of this region, we used the process-based Terrestrial Ecosystem Model to simulate fire emissions and changes in carbon storage north of 45°N from the start of spatially explicit historically recorded fire records in the twentieth century through 2002, and evaluated the role of fire in the carbon dynamics of the region within the context of ecosystem responses to changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate. Our analysis indicates that fire plays an important role in interannual and decadal scale variation of source/sink relationships of northern terrestrial ecosystems and also suggests that atmospheric CO2 may be important to consider in addition to changes in climate and fire disturbance. There are substantial uncertainties in the effects of fire on carbon storage in our simulations. These uncertainties are associated with sparse fire data for northern Eurasia, uncertainty in estimating carbon consumption, and difficulty in verifying assumptions about the representation of fires that occurred prior to the start of the historical fire record. To improve the ability to better predict how fire will influence carbon storage of this region in the future, new analyses of the retrospective role of fire in the carbon dynamics of northern high latitudes should address these uncertainties.Funding for this study was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation Biocomplexity Program (ATM-0120468) and Office of Polar Programs (OPP-0531047 and OPP- 0327664); the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Land Cover Land Use Change Program (NAF-11142) and North America Carbon Program (NNG05GD25G); the Bonanza Creek LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) Program (funded jointly by NSF grant DEB-0423442 and USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station grant PNW01- JV11261952-231); and the U.S. Geological Survey

Global Pyrogeography: the Current and Future Distribution of Wildfire

Climate change is expected to alter the geographic distribution of wildfire, a complex abiotic process that responds to a variety of spatial and environmental gradients. How future climate change may alter global wildfire activity, however, is still largely unknown. As a first step to quantifying potential change in global wildfire, we present a multivariate quantification of environmental drivers for the observed, current distribution of vegetation fires using statistical models of the relationship between fire activity and resources to burn, climate conditions, human influence, and lightning flash rates at a coarse spatiotemporal resolution (100 km, over one decade). We then demonstrate how these statistical models can be used to project future changes in global fire patterns, highlighting regional hotspots of change in fire probabilities under future climate conditions as simulated by a global climate model. Based on current conditions, our results illustrate how the availability of resources to burn and climate conditions conducive to combustion jointly determine why some parts of the world are fire-prone and others are fire-free. In contrast to any expectation that global warming should necessarily result in more fire, we find that regional increases in fire probabilities may be counter-balanced by decreases at other locations, due to the interplay of temperature and precipitation variables. Despite this net balance, our models predict substantial invasion and retreat of fire across large portions of the globe. These changes could have important effects on terrestrial ecosystems since alteration in fire activity may occur quite rapidly, generating ever more complex environmental challenges for species dispersing and adjusting to new climate conditions. Our findings highlight the potential for widespread impacts of climate change on wildfire, suggesting severely altered fire regimes and the need for more explicit inclusion of fire in research on global vegetation-climate change dynamics and conservation planning

Regional adaptation of a dynamic global vegetation model using a remote sensing data derived land cover map of Russia

The dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM) SEVER has been regionally adapted using a remote sensing data-derived land cover map in order to improve the reconstruction conformity of the distribution of vegetation functional types over Russia. The SEVER model was modified to address noticeable divergences between modelling results and the land cover map. The model modification included a light competition method elaboration and the introduction of a tundra class into the model. The rigorous optimisation of key model parameters was performed using a two-step procedure. First, an approximate global optimum was found using the efficient global optimisation (EGO) algorithm, and afterwards a local search in the vicinity of the approximate optimum was performed using the quasi-Newton algorithm BFGS. The regionally adapted model shows a significant improvement of the vegetation distribution reconstruction over Russia with better matching with the satellite-derived land cover map, which was confirmed by both a visual comparison and a formal conformity criterion