Economic effects of environmental concerns in forest management: An analysis of the cost of achieving the environmental goals

This study analyzes the economic effects of environmental concerns in forest management in the Swedish mountain region. The environmental concerns include the amount of deadwood, the area of broad-leaved forest, and the area of old growth forest. The analyses are performed by formulating a fuzzy linear programming (FLP) model for an example forest. The model is solved by using the modeling to generate alternatives (MGA) approach to generate a fixed number of alternatives. The alternatives generated are maximally different in the decision space and satisfactory with the timber objective. Results show that, if the forests are managed to meet the interim targets for Healthy Forests, the net present value of the profits of timber production is considerably reduced and this reduction can be approximately 56 %. The results also show that among the three environmental goals the deadwood need is most restrictive.