3. Adaptation and coping options in the silviculture
sector
Actions in the silviculture sector have signi®-
cant potential as response options to reduce global
warming by maintaining or increasing carbon
stocks in plantations and wood products and, in
the case of charcoal used in Brazil's iron and
steel industry, through fossil fuel substitution [21].
The potential of silviculture is more limited, however,
for adaptation, or coping in the sense of
getting along with climatic change, rather than as
a means of ®ghting against it.
Societies can adapt to change by altering the
productive activities they pursue to support their
populations. If climatic change renders certain areas less appropriate for the agricultural or
other use they formerly had and more appropriate,
for example, for a silvicultural plantation,
then a switch to forestry will be the likely outcome.
Even if the climatic conditions at the site
in question remain completely unchanged, climatic
changes elsewhere may alter the relative
prices of the dierent commodities that might be
produced, leading to a decision to use land for
forestry rather than, say, for pasture or annual
crops. Climatic change, of course, may not be
the only or even the principal cause of such
shifts: markets for products of plantation forestry
can be expected to increase in the future as a
result of the continued human destruction of
mature native forests in the tropical, temperate,
and boreal zones.