Evaluation of carbon sequestration service of forests – A Russian case-study

Prerequisites of a system methodology of evaluation of carbon sequestration service of forests (CSS) inter alia include: 1) need of assessment of the CSS in biophysical terms, in form of the Full Verified Carbon Account (FCA); 2) an ultimate proxy indicator of the FCA is Net Ecosystem Carbon Budget of forest ecosystems (NECB); 3) need of explicit spatio-temporal distribution of the service (in biophysical and economic terms) and estimation of uncertainties; 4) taken into account that the FCA is a fuzzy (underspecified) system, NECB and its major components are assessed by complimentary use of major methods of carbon accounting (landscape-ecosystem approach; process-based models; eddy covariance; and inverse modelling) with following harmonizing and mutual constraints of the independent estimates. Economic evaluation is provided based on quantitative models of ecosystem services, i.e. ecological production functions, and potential cost under different assumptions. This methodology has been realized for Russian forests for 2007-2009. The NECB was estimated based on an Integrated Land Information System, a multi-layer GIS, where the forest mask was developed at a spatial resolution of 1km by an aggregation of 12 recent remote sensing products, geographically weighted regression and crowdsourcing. Because interactions between ES are different (from synergetic to neutral to competitive to exclusive), economic evaluation of an individual service may not be directly used in integrated assessment of all services within the multipurpose paradigm of forest management. We reconsider the most complete Russian classification of forest ecosystem functions (totally of 75) within 4 classes of ES (provisioning, regulated, cultural, and supporting) and developed a matrix of interactions between CSS and other services that allows to define the range of economic estimates of the CSS under different prices for sequestered carbon and different regimes of forest management.