Subproject 10 Economic Assessment: Management strategies to reduce trade-offs between ecological and economic resilience
Persons involved:
Carola Paul (PI)
Kai Husmann (Postdoc)
Research outline:
In sub-project 10, indicators for economic and income-orientated forest functions are developed and measured. Using the data series carried out within the project and long-term observations of the project areas, we hope to gain a better understanding of the synergies and trade-offs between economic, ecological, and social indicators. By considering further time series that include disturbances, such as forest inventories, harvesting statistics or the National Forest Inventory, we will be able to analyze the responses within this complex indicator interplay upon disturbances and ultimately quantify the resilience of the economic indicators through a direct shock-response relationship to the other indicators. From this shock-response relationship, we will develop another indicator that acts as a kind of early warning system to assess the current vulnerability of forest stands using measurable attributes. The resilience estimates will be applied ‘close-to-real-time’ on the experimental stands and made will be made available as a model for integration into forest planning. Our hypothesis is that forests rich in species abundance and structure are also more economically resilient, as coniferous forests in particular are stabilised by the mixture with deciduous trees. From an economic perspective, the diversification effect also contributes to this hypothesis. This effect, known from portfolio theory, states that uncorrelated products increase the financial resilience of the forest.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Carola Paul
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Abteilung Forstökonomie und nachhaltige Landnutzungsplanung
Büsgenweg 3, 37077 Göttingen
Tel. +49-551-39-26762
carola.paul@uni-goettingen.de