Resource information
Forests and forestry play important roles in Austria with its close to 50/ forest cover. This paper provides details about the Austrian forest carbon inventory, discusses briefly the sources and sinks accounted under the land use, land use change and forestry articles of the Kyoto Protocol, and presents an integrated carbon model (Austrian C-Balance Model) that was developed to include not only the forest sector, but other sectors that are greenhouse-gas relevant. Improvements in forest management practices are seen as important possibilities of increasing the carbon sink strength of Austrian forests, but also of pursuing other goals such as increased biodiversity and resistance to future climate-change impacts. This paper presents a process model and a carbon accounting model that are applicable for evaluating carbon impacts of changes in forest management.
