Forestation is seen as a possible option to counter climate change by sequestering carbon in forests and thus reducing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. However, previous studies suggest that the Radiative Forcing (RF) caused by forestation-induced albedo change in snow-rich boreal regions may offset the carbon sequestration effect. The Swiss mountains are characterized by snow-rich areas with strongly varying environmental conditions and forest expansion is currently the dominant land-use change process. Thus, quantifying both carbon sequestration and albedo change on appropriately high resolution in this region will improve our understanding of the forests potential for climate mitigation. We calculated the albedo RF based on remotely sensed datasets of albedo, global radiation and snow cover. Carbon sequestration was estimated from changes in carbon stocks based on National Inventories. Our results show that the net RF of forest expansion ranges from −24 W m−2 at low elevations of the Northern Prealps to 2 W m−2 at high elevations of the Central Alps. The albedo RF increases with increasing altitude, which offsets the CO2 RF at high elevations with long snow-covered periods, high global radiation and low carbon sequestration. Results indicate that the albedo RF is particularly relevant during transitions from open land to open forest and not in later stages of forest development. The albedo RF offsets the CO2 RF by an average of 40% between 1985 and 1997 when overall forest expansion in Switzerland was approximately 4%. We conclude that the albedo RF should be considered at an appropriately high resolution when estimating the climatic effect of forestation in temperate mountainous regions.
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Schwaab et al. (2015) studied this question.