Climate change effect on the reforestation potential of Russia

The Kyoto protocol called for limiting the GHG emissions somewhere between the 8% reduction and 10% increase from the baseline. For Russia, carbon sequestration in forest biomass through reforestation and afforestation (carbon farming) can provide a way to cope with the Protocol restrictions. The long turnover period of high latitude forestry require consideration of a possible change in growing conditions. We have developed a stochastic model of vegetation migration (MOVE) to simulate the redistribution of zones available for forestry in a changing climate. To take into consideration the additional constraints for forestry, we corrected the model predictions, assuming that the current ratio between the predicted and actual forest area will be maintained in the future. The results of our model, obtained with several scenarios of climate change, give higher estimates of reforestation potential for Russia, as compared to the earlier predictions.