Date of Award:

5-2000

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Economics and Finance

Department name when degree awarded

Economics

Committee Chair(s)

Kenneth S. Lyon

Committee

Kenneth S. Lyon

Committee

Basudeb Biswas

Committee

Herbert H. Fullerton

Committee

Christopher Fawson

Committee

Yun Kim

Abstract

As global warming migrates ecosystems toward the poles, the result has been a change in the distribution of ecosystem types and the productivity of ecosystem as well. Similar to other natural resources, forests are also potentially affected as ecosystems move toward the poles. Consequently, human beings are forced to adapt, and global warming will generate an impact on the global timber market through changes in timber harvests, regeneration inputs, stumpage prices, etc. In addition, the dynamic process of forest change in response to economic activities of human beings will accelerate or dampen the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. In this context, we propose an integrated modeling approach to identify the effect of global warming on the global timber market, and examine the feedback effect of the global timber market on global warming.

To perform the primary research objective, we estimated dynamic ecological change based on (1) the simulation results of BIOME 3 using hamburg and (2) the linearity assumptions about change in climate and ecosystem. With the estimates of dynamic ecological change, we modified the Timber Supply Model 2000 (TSM 2000) to reflect the dynamic ecological change caused by climate change. After simulating the base scenario and the climate change scenario of TSM 2000, we identified that global warming has a positive effect on the global timber market.

For the secondary research objective, we extend the modeling framework by incorporating the Terrestrial Carbon Model (TCM) designed to investigate net carbon release into the atmosphere. Simulating both the base TCM and the modified TCM which reflects climate change, we identified that the global timber market has a dampening (negative feedback) effect on global warming through net carbon sequestering. Fore sensitivity analyses, we performed these simulation procedures under three different timber demand growth scenarios

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