Forest products: contribution to carbon storage and climate change mitigation

Climate change is one of the biggest threats for our earth. Mitigation of climate change is thus an urgent challenge our society needs to take up. Many benefits are provided by forests, and one is their potential to mitigate climate change. This mitigating effect can be achieved in many ways, for example increasing the stock of carbon in managed forests or replacing more emission-intensive goods with wood-based products. To maximize the climate mitigation potential of forest and wood products use it is important to correctly quantify their climate mitigating role. A tool to do so is life cycle assessment (LCA), which estimates the environmental burdens of services and goods over their entire life cycle. While this method has been widely used in the past in the forest sector, its application still poses many challenges. Here, we worked to improve the capability of LCA to be used as a tool to assess the climate mitigation potential of forests and wood products. This general context of the thesis is presented in chapter 1.In the first part of the thesis the challenge was addressed at a more generic LCA level.Chapter 2 focused on the collection and analysis of data on the current state of forest management practices in Europe. Based on the collected information the free and open EFO-LCI (European Forestry Operations Life Cycle Inventory) database was built. The collected data showed that European forests are quite diverse in many aspects like rotation length, amount and assortments of wood products harvested and machinery used in the interventions. This diversity in the management is also translated into different life cycle impacts. The variability of the input data proved to be an important factor in determining the variability of the Global Warming impact of raw wood production, with the estimated anthropogenic impacts ranging from 0.4 to 73.1 kg CO2eq/m3 in EFO-LCI and the biogenic impacts from 1.6 to 451.9 kg CO2eq/m3. The release of our regionalized inventory can
Doctorat en Sciences
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished