Abstract
The concept of forest transitions was introduced by geographers in the 1990s to describe the observation that forests regrow with industrialization in many parts of the world. We use the case of Austria to discuss the forest transition in the context of Social Ecology based on empirical evidence on Austria’s carbon budget in the period 1830–2010. In this period, Austria’s forests grew not only in area but also in wood density, resulting in a carbon sink of 23 %, or ca. 240 MtC (megatons carbon). This process was accompanied by increasing societal use of carbon, due in part to the surge in fossil fuel use and a fivefold increase in societal carbon stocks, or a sink of ca. 110 MtC, in 2010. As in ecosystems, (construction) wood was the main component driving rising carbon stocks in society. Although somewhat significant in extent, annual carbon sink rates are well below fossil fuel emissions to the atmosphere. We argue that the carbon sink in Austria’s ecosystems and society was a by-product of increasing societal carbon throughput in the course of industrialization, fuelled by the use of fossil energy, and that carbon sequestration is therefore an unsuitable strategy to mitigate carbon emissions.
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Notes
- 1.
Although somewhat different in focus, this argument is quite in line with ‘old’ arguments brought forward in the first discussions of the forest transition. Mather and Needle (1998) also discuss the fact that forest areas increase while agricultural areas retreat to the most favorable sites; however, they attribute this process to learning by farmers rather than technological change or energy availability.
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Gingrich, S., Lauk, C., Kastner, T., Krausmann, F., Haberl, H., Erb, KH. (2016). A Forest Transition: Austrian Carbon Budgets 1830–2010. In: Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Winiwarter, V. (eds) Social Ecology. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_20
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