When: Tuesday, September 22, 2026 | 12-1 pm
Where: Room CAWP 2916 (Caseroom)
This event is open to all and will be held in person only.
Seminar abstract
Tree-species diversification is widely regarded as a key strategy for adapting forests to climate change. However, its economic implications remain uncertain, particularly under increasingly frequent and severe disturbance events. This talk presents a suite of empirical and normative approaches developed to assess the economic consequences of tree-species diversification under climate-driven disturbance risk, combining econometric analyses, forest dynamics modeling, and optimization. Their application is illustrated through case studies from Central European forestry, addressing questions ranging from stand-level management decisions to regional-scale adaptation under extreme weather events. The findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of tree-species diversification as an economically viable climate adaptation strategy, emphasizing how its benefits depend on disturbance regimes, management decisions, and the spatial scale considered.
Speaker
Jasper M. Fuchs is a postdoctoral researcher in the Forest Resources Management group led by Prof. Verena Griess at ETH Zurich. His research takes a transdisciplinary perspective on forest economics with a focus on forest management planning at the interface with forest dynamics, silviculture, and operations research. His work develops data-driven approaches to analyze and optimize economically informed forest management under uncertainty, linking economic decision-making with forest growth modeling, market considerations, and silvicultural practice. In 2024, he received the Gerhard Speidel Dissertation Award for outstanding scientific contributions to forest economics and social sciences. In summer 2026, he will be visiting the University of British Columbia through a Swiss-Canadian exchange project with Prof. Bianca Eskelson. From November 2026, he will join the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria (BOKU) in a tenure-track position in Forest Economics.