Table 2. Assumptions for national forest management.

Category Description
Analytical unit

1 ha (standard stand; larch Larix kaempferi, 2nd grade)

Management period

50 years (based on medium-rotation timber stand).

Price standard

Recent-year real prices (fixed prices) are used for conversion; timber unit prices are based on the national average log prices reported in the 2025 second-quarter (June) log market price survey in Korea

Discount rate

Base rate of 2 percent (reflecting the practice of public project appraisal and long-term environmental valuation); sensitivity tests conducted at 1–3 percent.

Baseline

Includes all forest management operations—site cleaning, planting, weeding, vine removal, juvenile tending, pre-commercial thinning, commercial thinning, forest roads, surveying/estimation, and felling/extraction—in both Option A and Option B, reflecting that national forest management simultaneously performs timber and public functions

Onset of public benefits

Assumed to begin 20 years after afforestation (Elliott et al., 2017; Bernal et al., 2018; Gong et al., 2019).

Public benefits increase gradually to the national average level by year 30, and remain constant thereafter.

This reflects the representative pattern of forest ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration reaching a plateau after ≈ 30 years.

※ Public benefits are modeled to increase linearly from year 0 to year 30, achieving the full value (public_value_per_ha) by year 30 and then remaining constant each year thereafter.