Plantation forestry would be aected by climatic
change, both from global warming and
from other processes such as the reduction of
evapotranspiration that results from converting
Amazonian forests to cattle pasture. Most climatic
changes would have negative impacts on
plantation yields, thereby forcing the country to
maintain larger areas of silviculture to supply the
same ¯ows of forest products (and substantially
diminishing the pro®tability of doing so).
Nevertheless, Brazil's abundant land resources
place it in a privileged position in absorbing the
costs imposed by climatic change, as well as in
responding to the opportunities oered by proposed
countermeasures in the plantation forestry
sector (Fig. 1).
The trends in Brazil's silviculture sector have
been analyzed elsewhere as a reference scenario
for assessing the impacts of climatic changes and
of programs to combat global warming through
subsidizing silvicultural expansion [2]. Plantation
expansion can be expected to shift from Southern
Brazil to the Northeast and Amazon regions as
land suitable for plantations becomes progressively
more scarce in Southern Brazil and later in
the portion of the Northeast where rainfall is suf-
®cient. As plantations expand to meet growing
domestic demand and to take advantage of
export opportunities oered by international
markets for products derived from wood, the
marginal yield of new plantations can be
expected to decrease as progressively less-productive
sites are brought under silviculture [2].
The reference scenario projections assume a constant
per-capita demand for wood products in
Brazil and that Brazil's share of the market for
supplying wood products to non-tropical
countries remains constant (both conservative
assumptions). Under this scenario, in which climate
is assumed to be unchanged, plantations
will expand through the year 2050 to occupy an
area 3.2 times larger than the 7106 ha of plantations
Brazil had in 1991. Brazil's 1991 plantation
area places the country third in the world,
surpassed only by India and Indonesia. Brazil
hopes to increase its share of the global wood
products trade, partly by increasing its silvicultural
plantations.