engleski

CO2 and Forests in Croatia

Forests will have to adapt to the changing climate and so should forestry itself. Modernization of forest management in Croatia, primarily within the Croatian Forests Ltd. was in certain segments, such as implementation of a centralized database and GIS applications, very successful. However, some other segments, like preparation for the implementation of the KP, and research of the carbon sequestration potential of forests in Croatia, were considered outside of the scope of 'classical' forestry and therefore have been neglected. This should be changed. Forest policymakers and scientists involved in forest research should attempt to bridge the knowledge gap. We believe that the participation of the Forest Research Institute, Jastrebarsko in the Carbon-Pro Project has been a step in the right direction. The next steps should address concrete current issues and future research directions. One current issue is the establishment of a national reporting system for the LULUCF with an assessment of research needs and a proposed action plan. We believe that the bottom-up approach would prove most suitable. The main idea, from a technical point of view, is to add carbon balance information to the level of forest compartment and then to upscale to a national level. Of course, this would require data on soil and other missing pools. We believe that this should be addressed with a step-by-step scientific approach that would facilitate available substitute data from literature and appropriate models on one hand, while elaborating on country specific data and model parameters on the other. This approach eventually would enable Croatia to participate in building an accurate accounting system for carbon stocks and fluxes to be shared with, accepted by, and applied to all countries.

Croatian Forests; Kyoto Protocol; Carbon stocks; Carbon fluxes; LULUCF; BEF

U suradnji s Carbon-Pro projektinim timom