Feasibility of enhancing carbon sequestration and stock capacity in temperate and boreal European forests via changes to management regimes

•Large uncertainties are associated with the future magnitude and stability of the forest carbon sink.•Business-as-usual management practices might already be close-to-optimum for supporting forest carbon uptake and storage.•Increases in management intensity have the potential to lower forest carbon sequestration and stocking capacity.•Forest management practices are as important as climate change to regulatethe carbon sink and stock size. Forest management practices might act as nature-based methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow anthropogenic climate change and thus support an EU forest-based climate change mitigation strategy. However, the extent to which diversified management actions could lead to quantitatively important changes in carbon sequestration and stocking capacity at the tree level remains to be thoroughly assessed. To that end, we used a state-of-the-science bio-geochemically based forest growth model to simulate effects of multiple forest management scenarios on net primary productivity (NPP) and potential carbon woody stocks (pCWS) under twenty scenarios of climate change in a suite of observed and virtual forest stands in temperate and boreal European forests. Previous modelling experiments indicated that the capacity of forests to assimilate and store atmospheric CO2 in woody biomass is already being attained under business-as-usual forest management practices across a range of climate change scenarios. Nevertheless, we find that on the long-term, with increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration and warming, managed forests show both higher productivity capacity and a larger potential pool size of stored carbon than unmanaged forests as long as thinning and tree harvesting are of moderate intensity. [Display omitted]