Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas most responsible for the greenhouse effect. Since trees absorb CO2 during growth, some authors have argued for the importance of considering forests not only as timber producers but also as carbon pools. The consideration of carbon uptake as a public good generates a divergence between the private and social optima. This paper presents a methodology to determine optimal forest rotation ages in this context of multiple use and to remove the divergence between these two optima. A theoretical framework, based upon compromise programming, is applied to a case study of a beech forest in Spain, within the context of the current European financial aid for afforestation programs.
