In Hungary, there are forestry means that could be used to remove carbon from the air. These can be grouped by means that aim to protect existing carbon pools, and those thait aim to increase carbon pools (see Table 1 below).

Table 1. Possible means of forestry to mitigate climate change and their relative importance. (Theoretically, the potentials of forestry in the whole world are to fix 60-87 billion t C until 2050. The greatest potentials are at the tropics with optimal management of 300-600 million ha of forest (amounting to fixing 36-72 billion tC, which is 80% of all potentials). In the temperate zone, the potential is to fix 13-26 billion t C (17%), and in the boreal zone, 2,4-5,6 billion tC (3%). Considering large countries: the potential of Russia is 4,5-11 billion tC, that of the USA is 15 bilion tC, whereas China has 172, and India 175 million ha of land where afforestations for carbon can be made; Canell, 1995.)

As it can be seen also from the above table, afforesting (or reforesting) large areas is the only possible means in forestry by which relatively large amounts of carbon could be removed from the air. In a study, which was based on running CASFOR, the predecessor of CASMOFOR, possibilities were estimated in three (I, II, III) scenarios of intensive afforestations (afforesting 773, 400 and 200 thousand hectare of abandoned agricultural fields in 50 years with either predominantly fast growing exotic tree species, or mainly with slow growing indigenous tree species). More details can be found in the study above. See also the Credits and References section for more details.

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