Strategic forest management planning and sustainable forest supply chain design in Northeastern Argentina

Abstract

The forest sector of Northeastern Argentina accounts for nearly 80% of the national planted-forest output, with growth rates well above those of Europe and North America; nevertheless, neither the management of the resource nor the industry that processes it are optimized in an integrated manner. This work addresses the problem at two complementary levels, formulated as generalized disjunctive programs (GDP) and reformulated as mixed-integer linear programs (MILP). The first level plans the management of 10,141 Pinus stands (44,437 ha) in Misiones over a 40-year horizon, simultaneously maximizing net present value (NPV) and net CO₂ sequestration. To make the problem tractable, a three-stage clustering strategy is proposed —soil type, clear-cut year and spatial consolidation— which builds Forest Management Units (FMUs) and reduces model size by a factor of 70 to 100, allowing instances that are intractable without aggregation to be solved within optimality gaps below 1%. The second level designs the forest biorefinery supply chain across Misiones, Corrientes and Entre Ríos, minimizing total present cost and maximizing a social index composed of two indices: one associated with generated employment, unemployment, and the economically active population, and another associated with the economic value weighted by the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) of each node. At both levels the resulting Pareto frontiers are asymmetric: environmental and social improvements are attained at comparatively low economic cost.