Forested land in Lithuania and impact climate change 1990-2010

Climate change is one of the major environmental problems challenging global society. Growing population, industry irrational land use and deforestation destroys carbon cycle and provokes increasing release of CO2 – the main gas that causes the greenhouse effect - into atmosphere [1]. These amounts are growing because of various factors including deforestation, draining of wetlands and other factors that relate to changes of land usage and different capacity accumulate carbon [2, 3]. The paper aims to estimate the changes in forested land in Lithuania and their impact on climate change over 1990 -2010 period. The effect on climate change was evaluated recalculating carbon accumulation in the forests biomass of Lithuania to the CO2 emissions. The percentage of forested land has increased by 3.3% from 1991 till 2010 and now amounts up to 32.6% of all Lithuanian territory. This was caused by planned and self-contained afforestation. The amount of aboveground biomass in Lithuanian forests has increased by 12% (30 million tonnes) from 1990 until 2010. The underground biomass of forests has also increased by 12% and this amounted to 6.9 million tonnes. The amount of carbon in aboveground and underground biomass in the forests has increased respectively by 40.4 million tonnes. Following the increasing amount of accumulated carbon, the amount of sequestered CO2 during this period has increased by 148.3 million tonnes in Lithuanian forest. Hence, afforestation is one of appropriate tools to mitigate CO2 emissions and climate change. Big areas of land utilities are not used for agricultural purpose in Lithuania and could be used for forest planting and improving environmental protection, social and economic surroundingsAplinkotyros katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta