Dealing with the risk of fire in carbon sequestration strategies: Diverse forests or plantation monocultures?

Abstract

Climate and land-use change pose unprecedented threats to ecosystems, economies, and communities worldwide. To help mitigate the climate crisis, restoration is a rapidly growing industry used to offset carbon emissions. The most common approach is to plant fast-growing monocultures with the aim of sequestering as much carbon as possible in the shortest time. However, there has been little economic analysis of planting options that explicitly address short and long-term ecological risks such as fire, disease, and environmental change. Here we develop a method for quantifying ecological risks from fire to sequestration investments and show how these risks can be factored into an analysis of lo..