Global change and the role of forests in future land-use systems

We analyse options to adapt forest and agricultural ecosystems to the adverse consequences of climatic change. We provide an overview of global change as it relates to the forest and agriculture sectors and conclude that forests should be analysed and their management optimised, together with their neighbouring agricultural ecosystems, if we are to be successful in meeting the challenges of future land-use conflicts. These challenges include balancing the need to satisfy increasing food and resource demands (provisioning services) while still providing indispensable regulating services such as climate and water protection. For the forestry sector, we identify various options to adapt ecosystems to climatic change, such as appropriate choice of tree species, mixed and uneven-aged forests, thinnings and adapted rotation length. We see, however, great potential in comprehensive land-use portfolios containing mixed, and thus diversified, alternatives-with patches of croplands, pastures and forests-to achieve a more sustainable intensification of land-use concepts. Such concepts would reduce the vulnerability of land-use systems to the effects of climatic change. Natural forests, whose continued existence must be secured by conservation payments, are a necessary component used to store carbon, to protect the water balance and to preserve biodiversity. In future, comprehensive land-use models are necessary to make demonstrable and to optimise the ecological and economic consequences of various land-use concepts.