Climate-Smart Forestry in Russia and potential climate change mitigation benefits

Samenvatting

In response to climate change, Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) has been introduced as a holistic approach to guide forest management (Nabuurs et al., 2017; Bowditch et al., 2020), with the aim to connect mitigation with adaptation measures, enhance the resilience of forest resources and ecosystem services, and meet the needs of a growing population. CSF builds on the concepts of sustainable forest management, with a strong focus on climate and ecosystem services, and has three mutually reinforcing components (Verkerk et al., 2020) that are employed in a mix of spatially diverse forest management strategies:
• Increasing carbon storage in forests and wood products, in conjunction with other ecosystem services;
• Enhancing the health and resilience through adaptive forest management; and
• Using wood resources sustainably to substitute non-renewable, carbon-intensive
materials.
In this chapter, we applied the CSF approach to provide insights in the climate change mitigation potential (and other impacts) of alternative CSF implementation strategies
across Russia. Due to the significantly varying regional circumstances we aimed to illustrate this through three case studies.