Economic effects of environmental concerns in forest management: an analysis of the cost of achieving 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 analysis is performed by formulating a fuzzy linear programming model for the forests in three communes. The model is solved using the modeling to generate alternative approach to generate a number of management plans, which are maximally different from each other in the decision space and are satisfactory with respect to the timber production objective. The 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 could be as high as 55%. The results also show that among the three environmental goals the increase in deadwood volume is the most restrictive one.