Antonello Lobianco

Storms pose a significant threat to economic activities in the forest sector and introduce non-permanence risks for carbon stocks. Following escalating climate ambitions, understanding and addressing these risks becomes imperative. Uncertainties intrinsic to the storm phenomenon render this task complex. This study uses an integrated forest sector model to assess the economic and carbon impacts of storm regimes, emphasizing the importance of uncertainties through Monte Carlo simulation. From an economic perspective, we unravel complex interplays between the salvage and inventory effects of storms that lead to heterogeneous transfers of economic welfare across agents and space. Non-affected forest owners benefit from inflated prices, while affected owners’ recovery hinges on the magnitude of storm damage. From a climate perspective, storms significantly impact the forest sector’s carbon sink, with a high risk of falling short on mitigation objectives. In 25% of simulations, we observe a substantial 24% decrease in carbon sequestration. Our findings advocate for (1) conservative reliance on natural carbon sinks in national climate mitigation strategies toward net-zero, and (2) tailored risk-sharing insurance mechanisms for forest owners, providing a buffer against economic uncertainties arising from climatic disruptions.

Under the influence of climate change, wildfire regimes are expected to intensify and expand to new areas, increasing threats to natural and socioeconomic assets. We explore the environmental and economic implications for the forest sector of climate‐induced changes in wildfire regimes. To retain genericity while considering local determinants, we focus on the regional level and take Mediterranean France as an example. Coupling a bioeconomic forest sector model and a model of wildfire activity, we perform spatially explicit simulations under various levels of radiative forcing. By using a probabilistic framework, we also assess the propagation of several sources of uncertainty to the forest sector, considering both climate‐induced uncertainty and the intrinsic stochasticity of the fire process. By the end of the century, summer burned areas increase by up to 55%, causing moderate losses of merchantable timber and forest carbon stocks, with cascading impacts for industrial activities and climate mitigation in the forest sector. Implications for industries remain limited, but we observe price increases, especially for softwoods, as well as spatially differentiated changes in producer welfare. Inter‐annual fluctuations explain most of uncertainty in wildfire activity, but their impacts on the forest sector are quickly dampened. Over time, owing to the cumulative nature of wildfire impacts on forest resources, uncertainty related to climate warming, climate models’ response and stochasticity intrinsic to the wildfire phenomenon strongly increase in relative importance. Results reassert the need to consider multiple futures in prospective assessments, including uncertainty inherent to natural processes, often omitted in large‐scale economic assessments.

Objectives: Evaluate the capacity of temperate forest resources to both provide climate change mitigation and to sustain the downstream timber sector explicitly considering the cascade of biophysical and economic drivers (in particular, climate change impacts and subsequent adaptation actions) and their uncertainty. Methodology: A recursive bio-economic model of French forest resources, management, and timber markets has been coupled for this study with spatial statistical models of forest response to climate change long-term scenarios and land-use change. Main Results:

Rural areas still play a major role within the EU, as Europe is still a fairly rural continent. Moreover, EU rural areas are going through greater challenges and major transformations. After the Eastern enlargements of the EU (in 2004 and 2007), they are getting more and more heterogeneous, in terms of their main socio-economic features as well as of agricultural activities. According to this increasing heterogeneity, the traditional urban-rural divide can be now considered almost outdated (OECD, 2006). Indeed, a multidimensional approach is crucial in order to catch all the different features affecting trends and development of rural areas. For example, central rural regions in Continental countries sharply differ from more peripheral rural areas still facing major development issues. This research has highlighted the main dimensions affecting EU rural areas. First, some considerations on the main drivers of EU territorial development have been analysed. Then, throughout cluster analysis, specific typologies of EU rural areas have been identified. According to this classification, clear territorial patterns emerge. Actually, clusters of more central and more accessible regions are quite different from those clusters composed by more peripheral and lagging behind regions. Thus, geography still affects deeply both the economic performance of regions and their main socio-demographic trends (both in urban and rural areas). Moreover, by computing a comprehensive PeripheRurality (PR) Index, the existence of a more complex geography at the EU scale emerges. National approaches to rural and peripheral areas should be substituted by broader approaches, encompassing all the different territorial level of the analysis.