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| 14 feb 2012 |
09:33 |
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Trees for the future: Climate change could mean big changes for Europe’s forests
Though they have survived fires, insect outbreaks and logging, the forests of Europe may now their biggest challenge ever: climate change. Disrupted weather patterns could intensify droughts, fires, storms, pest infestations, species loss, and other natural calamities harmful or even fatal to forests.
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Rather than wait until Europe’s forests begin to die off, the European Union is taking steps to prevent such a catastrophe. The EU is supporting leading trees they should plant now, and what kind of pests and diseases should be monitored become a problem in a climate-changed future.
“Forests are incredibly complicated ecosystems that climate change can disrupt in equally complicated ways,” said Hervé Jactel of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, leader of the EU research project BACCARA.
Launched in 2009 with €3 million in support from the EU, BACCARA is a four assess how climate change will affect the one of many joint efforts being undertaken during the “Year of the Forests,” which the United Nations declared for 2011 in order to help conserve the biodiversity of forests and sustainably forestlands.
To remove some of the guesswork from managing Europe’s forests, BACCARA’s researchers are trying to predict how certain kinds of trees will fare in terms of growth and pest centuries to come.
Among their findings, researchers have learned that the very complexity of forests might be the best insurance for coping with climate change.
“Planting several different species of trees, for example, can protect forests from insect attacks better tha planting just one type of tree,” Jactel said. “So if climate change can cause harmful insects to thrive, this would be a good strategy to combat pests.”
The problem for everyone involved with managing Europe’s forests is that many types of trees can liv centuries, so a tree planted today could have to deal with climate changes for a very long time. So the challenge, Jactel said, is to design multi hazards.
The economic stakes are high for Europe, whose forest industry is worth million jobs. Totalling some 1 billion hectares, Europe has more forestland than any other region in the world – from cork-oak and cypress forests along the Mediterranean, to the and mixed forests of the Caucasus.
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