Projecting impacts of global climate change on the US forest and agriculture sectors and carbon budgets

A multiperiod, regional, mathematical programming model is used to evaluate the potential economic impacts of global climatic change scenarios on the US forest and agricultural sectors, including impacts on forest carbon inventories. Four scenarios of the biological response of forests to climate change (reflected by changes in forest growth rates) are drawn from a national assessment of climate change and are based on combinations of global circulation and ecological process models. These scenarios are simulated in the forest and agricultural sector model and results are summarized to characterize broad impacts of climate change on the sectors. We find that less cropland is projected to be converted to forests, forest inventories generally increase, and that aggregate economic impacts (across all consumers and producers in the sector) are relatively small. Producers' income is most at risk, and impacts of global climate change on the two sectors vary over the 100-year projection period. The forest sector is found to have adjustment mechanisms that mitigate climate change impacts, including interregional migration of production, substitution in consumption, and altered stand management.