Nordic forest management towards climate change mitigation: time dynamic temperature change impacts of wood product systems including substitution effects

Climate change mitigation trade-offs between increasing harvests to exploit substitution effects versus accumulating forest carbon sequestration complicate recommendations for climate beneficial forest management. Here, a time dynamic assessment ascertains climate change mitigation potential from different rotation forest management alternatives across three Swedish regions integrating the forest decision support system Heureka RegWise with a wood product model using life cycle assessment data. The objective is to increase understanding on the climate effects of varying the forest management. Across all regions, prolonging rotations by 20% leads on average to the largest additional net climate benefit until 2050 in both, saved emissions and temperature cooling, while decreasing harvests by 20% leads to the cumulatively largest net climate benefits past 2050. In contrast, increasing harvests or decreasing the rotation period accordingly provokes temporally alternating net emissions, or slight net emission, respectively, regardless of a changing market displacement factor. However, future forest calamities might compromise potential additional temperature cooling from forests, while substitution effects, despite probable prospective decreases, require additional thorough and time explicit assessments, to provide more robust policy consultation.

Automated summary

This study assesses the climate change mitigation potential of different rotation forest management alternatives in three regions of Sweden using a time dynamic assessment. The results show that prolonging rotations by 20% provides the largest additional net climate benefit until 2050, while decreasing harvests by 20% leads to the cumulatively largest net climate benefits past 2050.