The most sophisticated computer models claim to simulate the way our main vegetation groups react to climate change. A simulator such as CARAIB, for example, developed by researchers at the University of Liège, is capable of producing global maps of the state of the planet’s vegetation in 50 years or 100 years time, depending on if the planet’s average temperature will have risen by 1°, 3° or 6°. In all the possible scenarios, olive trees will be at Belgium’s doors and the fir trees ‘of our Ardennes’ will be struggling to survive in our latitudes.

As if the fir trees of our Ardennes have not already been suffering from a bad reputation in recent years, primarily because of a deplorable tendency of impoverishing the soil in which they grow, now it turns out that climatologists class them amongst the species which are ‘very sensitive’ to global warming. To tell the truth, one doesn’t need a doctorate in climate sciences to see that at its origins the spruce is a tree from northern Europe, imported to our latitudes several centuries ago for the wood trade. Foresters have appreciated the rapid growth of this conifer, which has ‘come in from the cold’, which makes it much more productive than the broad leaved trees that grow naturally here. But with the global warming predicted by experts - between 1.1° and 6.4° according to different scenarios - the spruce risks getting serious sunstroke in the decades to come! So what should be planted in its place? What will the climate in Belgium be like in 40 to 50 years time, when the trees placed in the soil today will have reached maturity? Should we already be investing in Mediterranean like species, such as the Lebanese cedar, for example?

These questions are at the heart of the preoccupations of a working group brought together a few months ago at the initiative of the Walloon Minister for the Environment, Benoît Lutgen. This group of experts will shortly publish a report concerning the impact of global warming on forestry management. Amongst these experts we discover, of course, botanists, agriculturalists and forestry engineers, but also climatologists, such as Louis François, a lecturer at the University of Liège, and a specialist of the impact of climate change on vegetation. ‘To model in a more precise and reliable way the development of forests and other vegetation systems in terms of predictable climate scenarios,’ explains Louis François, ‘will be one of the big issues of climate research in the coming years.’