Global climate change and logging volumes in Siberian regions from 1946 to 1992
Despite the growing discussion of the problems of the economy of climate change, there is a lack of empirical research on the possible effects of global warming on natural resource management. This problem is especially important for Russia, rich in natural and land resources but showing significant research gap in related fields. In this article, the author focuses on the effects of a gradually changing climate on the logging volume, taking into account the spatial differentiation of the Russian regions. The statistics of logging in the regions of Russia (RSFSR) and the corresponding meteorological information are both available for the period from 1946 to 1992. The analysis of causality relies on the well-known Granger test with Toda - Yamamoto procedure. As the research findings show, the global trends of gradual increase in air temperature in the regions concerned coincide with the global trends. However, despite this fact, there is no reason to consider this effect as the reason for the increase in the logging volume in the observed period. Similar results were obtained for precipitation. Two facts can explain this conclusion: a) in the period under review there was a significant growth in the total volume of logging, which was determined by high rates of growth of the entire Soviet economy but was not limited to the state of the resource base of the industry; b) the beginning of temperature changes had to be about the middle of the period and did not have time to have a significant impact on the state of the resource base of the industry.