Climate change mitigation strategies in the forest sector: biophysical impacts and economic implications in British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

Managing forests to increase carbon sequestration or reduce carbon emissions and using wood products and bioenergy to store carbon and substitute for other emission-intensive products and fossil fuel energy have been considered effective ways to tackle climate change in many countries and regions. The objective of this study is to examine the climate change mitigation potential of the forest sector by developing and assessing potential mitigation strategies and portfolios with various goals in British Columbia (BC), Canada. From a systems perspective, mitigation potentials of five individual strategies and their combinations were examined with regionally differentiated implementations of changes. We also calculated cost curves for the strategies and explored socio-economic impacts using an input-output model. Our results showed a wide range of mitigation potentials and that both the magnitude and the timing of mitigation varied across strategies. The greatest mitigation potential was achieved by improving the harvest utilization, shifting the commodity mix to longer-lived wood products, and using harvest residues for bioenergy. The highest cumulative mitigation of 421 MtCO2e for BC was estimated when employing the strategy portfolio that maximized domestic mitigation during 2017–2050, and this would contribute 35% of BC’s greenhouse gas emission reduction target by 2050 at less than $100/tCO2e and provide additional socio-economic benefits. This case study demonstrated the application of an integrated systems approach that tracks carbon stock changes and emissions in forest ecosystems, harvested wood products (HWPs), and the avoidance of emissions through the use of HWPs and is therefore applicable to other countries and regions.

Climate change mitigation in Canada’s forest sector: a spatially explicit case study for two regions

“…Although beyond the scope of the current analyses, economic and socio-economic analyses should also be addressed to understand potential barriers to implementation [6, 29]. Mitigation scenarios levels were considered to be feasible, but there are uncertainties about technical feasibility, regulatory barriers, and market barriers that were not considered.…”

A Participatory Approach to Evaluating Strategies for Forest Carbon Mitigation in British Columbia

“…According to recent studies, forest carbon mitigation in Canada [37,56,68], as well as other parts of the world (e.g., Sweden [74]; USA [75]), cannot be maximized by implementing a single strategy, but rather with combinations of options adapted to geographical particularities. Only a systems perspective taking into account all the carbon pools and fluxes will allow identification of the best mitigation scenario(s) and an understanding of the trade-offs between increasing carbon storage in forest ecosystems or increasing it in wood products [2,18,20].…”

“…The presentation mainly revisited the information found in a consultation document (supplementary material titled "Primer second series of workshops") that had been provided to the participants in preparation for the event and describes in detail the whole process, the objectives, and the strategies [38]. Five of the evaluated strategies originate from a parallel study [37], independent of the engagement process, that was carried out by a team of multidisciplinary experts from the overarching project. At least one member of this team attended each of the workshops as technical experts.…”

“…At least one member of this team attended each of the workshops as technical experts. The parallel process involved the development of strategies and the modelling of their climate change mitigation potential, financial, and socioeconomic impacts for the years 2017-2050 (more details on the strategies and the modelling exercise can be found in [37]; Table S1 identifies the outputs of the biophysical and socio-economic modelling that were provided to workshop participants). Late in the process, a sixth strategy, rehabilitation, was added because it had subsequently been proposed by the government of BC as a potential mitigation strategy in the Climate Leadership Plan [4] and was included in the BC government's Forest Carbon Initiative announced in February 2017.…”

Uncertainty of inventory-based estimates of the carbon dynamics of Canada’s managed forest (1990–2014)

“…However, some of these processes also vary in their intrinsic degree of predictability (Luo et al 2015), meaning that some factors causing large contributions to uncertainty may prove difficult to reduce (e.g., fine root turnover and its spatial and temporal variations). Despite all of these sources of uncertainty, models are useful for quantifying and ranking policy alternatives Xu et al 2017), and their utility for such applications is increased when uncertainties are explicitly stated and quantified (Gregr and Chan 2015). They also continue to be required to meet obligations for GHG reporting under international climate conventions.…”