Cost–benefit Analysis of the Log Gathering in Korea

The gathering of political forest tending and forest biomass gathering have been enforced in Korea since 2009. However, the gathering has been enforced without checking feasibility of the policy, thereby causing a lot of controversy on the cost efficiency. Especially, the gathering quantity is calculated as CO_2 emission of forest in IPCC guideline. Thus, cost–benefit analysis was carried out in this study to check the feasibility of the gathering policy enforced in Korea. For cost item, operating cost of political forest tending gathering and forest biomass gathering as well as CO_2 loss quantity due to the gathering were selected and for benefit items, product sales income was selected to calculate the monetary value accordingly. However, labor cost of forest biomass log gathering was considered as transfer expenditure that is offset with effects of employment and it was excluded from evaluation. According to the result of cost–benefit analysis, the present value of cost is 2% higher than that of benefit. A sensitivity analysis showed that the most influential factor of internal return rate was found to be sales price of log. Further, it was found that the log should be sold over 356,000m^3 from 2012 to make the gathering policy feasible. To increase the sales quantity of the gathered logs, it is necessary to expand demanders by developing diverse uses such as wood chip and pellet and to organize professional gathering group to increase the gathering efficiency