Innovative wood use can enable carbon-beneficial forest management in California

Abstract

Responsible stewardship of temperate forests can address key challenges posed by climate change through sequestering carbon, producing low-carbon products, and mitigating climate risks. Forest thinning and fuel reduction can mitigate climate-related risks like catastrophic wildfire. These treatments are often cost prohibitive, though, in part because of low demand for low-value wood “residues.” Where treatment occurs, this low-value wood is often burned or left to decay, releasing carbon. In this study, we demonstrate that innovative use of low-value wood, with improved potential revenues and carbon benefits, can support economical, carbon-beneficial forest management outcomes in California. With increased demand for wood residues, forest health–oriented thinning could produce up to 7.3 million (M) oven-dry tonnes of forest residues per year, an eightfold increase over current levels. Increased management and wood use could yield net climate benefits between 6.4 and 16.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (M tCO2e) per year when considering impacts from management, wildfire, carbon storage in products, and displacement of fossil carbon-intensive alternatives over a 40-y period. We find that products with durable carbon storage confer the greatest benefits, as well as products that reduce emissions in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like industrial heat. Concurrently, treatment could reduce wildfire hazard on 4.9 M ha (12.1 M ac), a quarter of which could experience stand-replacing effects without treatment. Our results suggest that innovative wood use can support widespread fire hazard mitigation and reduce net CO2 emissions in California.

Comprehensive review of carbon quantification by improved forest management offset protocols

“…All of the protocols we reviewed exaggerate the emissions associated with the production of HWPs by ignoring their displacement of other fossil-intensive alternatives. Substitution benefits are typically high for construction-based materials, such as steel or concrete (Smyth et al, 2017;Geng et al, 2019) and vary widely for energy products, such as biomass used to generate electricity and heat, based on the product displaced (Cabiyo et al, 2021). Ignoring these benefits results in some over-crediting and also shifts protocol incentives toward projects that reduce harvesting.…”

Managing nature-based solutions in fire-prone ecosystems: Competing management objectives in California forests evaluated at a landscape scale

“…Another accounting change could reevaluate how the carbon sequestered in wood products is incorporated in carbon crediting. Better incorporating woody products could better align forest and carbon management outcomes (Cabiyo et al, 2021). An example of this could be using woody residue from fuel treatments for biofuel production, offsetting use of fossil fuels in transportation and expanding a market for nontimber wood products (Sanchez et al, 2021).…”

Development of a prototype modeling system to estimate the GHG mitigation potential of forest and wildfire management

“…Many additional wildfire and forest management scenarios could be considered such as thinning, treating ladder fuels, prescribed burning, cultural burning, other fuel reduction techniques and altering landscape spatial configurations, as well as wildfire control activities [ 7 , 15 , 16 , 19 , 28 ]. Additional scenario analyses will also need to be informed by improving the modelled feedbacks between fuel characteristics and fire behaviour, both in terms of fire spread rates and fire intensity.…”