Brent Sohngen

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Brent Sohngen

Professor

sohngen.1@osu.edu

614-688-4640

Office:

322 Ag Admin Building

2120 Fyffe Road Columbus, Ohio 43210

Professional Information

Degrees & Credentials:

DF, Natural Resource & Environmental Economics, Yale University (1996)

BS, Applied Economics & Business Management, Cornell University (1991)

Interests & Expertise:

Natural Resource & Environmental Economics - Valuing Environmental Change

Modeling land-use/land-cover change

Economics of non-point source pollution

Biography:

Brent Sohngen is a professor of environmental and resource economics in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. Dr. Sohngen received his doctorate in environmental and resource economics from Yale University in 1996. He conducts research on the economics of land use change, the design of incentive mechanisms for water and carbon trading, carbon sequestration, and valuation of environmental resources. Dr. Sohngen developed a global forest and land use model that has been widely used to assess the implications of climate change on ecosystems and markets, and to assess the costs of carbon sequestration in forests. Dr. Sohngen has written or co-written over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles, and 60 monographs and book chapters. He co-authored sections of the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and he co-authored the forestry chapter of the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. He teaches courses on “Food, Population and the Environment” and “Energy, the Environment, and the Economy”.

Documents:

sohngen_CV_long_01_24.pdf

Works

The Effect of Climate Change on Global Timber Markets

Date published:

Aug 13 1998

Publication type:

Working paper

Our Author(s):

Brent Sohngen

By Brent Sohngen, Robert Mendelsohn, and Roger Sedjo

Ecological models predict that climate change will have widespread impacts on the distribution and growth of forests around the globe. This paper carefully links these impacts to a dynamic global timber market model in order to determine how markets will adapt to these changes. The results suggest that climate change will expand long term global timber supply, timber prices will fall, and the welfare from timber will increase between 3.0 and 6.7%. Although global harvests increase, the area of both industrial and remaining inaccessible wilderness forests expands during climate. Consumers in all regions benefit from lower prices, but producer welfare varies from region to region. In general, producer surplus in developing countries rises while it declines in developed countries.

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An Assessment of Four Large Scale Timber Market Models

Date published:

Aug 13 1998

Publication type:

Working paper

Our Author(s):

Brent Sohngen

Differences in timber market models that arise from alternative assumptions and fundamental differences in theory and structure can lead to disparate published results, as well as confusion among policy analysts and industry. This paper presents a thorough comparison of four widely used models, and then analyzes a set of published market predictions relative to historical data. The goal is to understand how fundamental differences between the models may affect market predictions. Several conclusions are drawn. First, market outlooks are largely a function of exogenous demand growth and timberland management assumptions, although differences in theory and structure are important. Second, spatial equilibrium models adapt to changing conditions by shifting price growth from region to region, while dynamic optimization models shift harvest quantities. Finally, model output must be assessed carefully, and often with a thorough understanding of input assumptions and alternative scenarios.

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The Effectiveness of Forest Carbon Sequestration Strategies with System-Wide Adjustments

Date published:

May 13 1998

Publication type:

Working paper

Our Author(s):

Brent Sohngen

By Brent Sohngen, Robert Mendelsohn, and Roger Sedjo

This paper addresses the effectiveness of tree planting and forest conservation strategies to increase the sink of carbon in global forests. Because forests are expected to sequester additional carbon without explicit human intervention, a baseline case is presented. The baseline predicts that forests will sequester an additional 17.9 Pg (1015 grams) of carbon over the next 150 years, with nearly 95% of this accruing to storage in marketed forest products. The paper then compares strategies which assume markets adjust to changes in future timber supply to an optimistic regional planner case in which no market adjustment occurs. The resulting predictions show that system wide market interactions may lead to substantial leakage of carbon from the forest system.

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