Estimating New Zealand's harvested wood products carbon stocks and stock changes.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Wakelin, Stephen J. Searles, Nigel Lawrence, Daniel Paul, Thomas S. H.
Abstract	BackgroundReducing net greenhouse gas emissions through conserving existing forest carbon stocks and encouraging additional uptake of carbon in existing and new forests have become important climate change mitigation tools. The contribution of harvested wood products (HWPs) to increasing carbon uptake has been recognised and approaches to quantifying this pool developed. In New Zealand, harvesting has more than doubled since 1990 while log exports have increased by a factor of 11 due to past afforestation and comparatively little expansion in domestic processing. This paper documents New Zealand’s application of the IPCC approaches for reporting contributions of the HWP pool to net emissions, in order to meet international greenhouse gas inventory reporting requirements. We examine the implications of the different approaches and assumptions used in calculating the HWP contribution and highlight model limitations.ResultsChoice of system boundary has a large impact for a country with a small domestic market and significant HWP exports. Under the Production approach used for New Zealand’s greenhouse gas inventory reporting, stock changes in planted forests and in HWPs both rank highly as key categories. The contribution from HWPs is even greater under the Atmospheric Flow approach, because emissions from exported HWPs are not included. Conversely the Stock Change approach minimises the contribution of HWPs because the domestic market is small. The use of country-specific data to backfill the time series from 1900 to 1960 has little impact but using country-specific parameters in place of IPCC defaults results in a smaller HWP sink for New Zealand. This is because of the dominance of plantation forestry based on a softwood mainly used in relatively short-lived products.ConclusionsThe NZ HWP Model currently meets international inventory reporting requirements. Further disaggregation of the semi-finished HWP end uses both within New Zealand and in export markets is required to improve accuracy. Product end-uses and lifespans need to be continually assessed to capture changes. More extensive analyses that include the benefits of avoided emissions through product substitution and life cycle emissions from the forestry sector are required to fully assess the contribution of forests and forest products to climate change mitigation and a low emissions future.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC7243304&blobtype=pdf
Journal	Carbon Balance and Management [Carbon Balance Manag]
Volume Number	15
DOI	10.1186/s13021-020-00144-5
PubMed Central reference number	PMC7243304
Issue Number	1
PubMed reference number	32440735
e-ISSN	17500680
Language	English
Publisher	Springer International Publishing
Publisher Date	2020-05-21
Publisher Place	Gewerbestrasse 11, Cham, Ch 6330, Switzerland
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. © The Author(s) 2020
Subject Keyword	Greenhouse gas emissions Harvested wood products (HWPs) Carbon stocks Stock changes climate change mitigation IPCC models
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law Earth and Planetary Sciences Global and Planetary Change