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Nations’ water footprints and virtual water trade of wood products
- Publication Year :
- 2022
-
Abstract
- Several studies addressed the water footprint (WF) of countries and virtual water (VW) trade in agricultural and industrial products, but freshwater use associated with wood products has received little attention. Yet, international trade in wood products has been growing, and forestry competes with other forest ecosystem services over limited freshwater resources. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to assess nations’ WFs of consumption of wood products, the sustainability of these WFs, and the VW flows associated with international trade in wood products. We account nations’ WFs of and VW trade in wood products with a Multi-regional Input-Output model (MRIO-forest) that tracks wood flows along global supply chains (production, processing, trade, and final uses) for the period 1997-2017 and assess the sustainability of the green and blue WF of wood products in 2017. The WF of wood production increased from 8.37 × 1011 m3/y in 1997 to 9.87 × 1011 m3/y in 2017. About 38% (3.76 × 1011 m3/y) of this WF relates to wood products for export (in 2017), which means that VW trade associated with wood products ranks in between agricultural and industrial products in absolute volumes. About 10% (9.9 × 1010 m³/y) of the green WF and 11% (3.4 × 109 m³/y) of the blue WF of wood products in 2017 are unsustainable, meaning that they are located in areas where the total green/blue WF exceeds the maximum sustainable green/blue WF. The unsustainable green WF occurs mainly in Germany, Indonesia, the Czech Republic and the UK, and mainly relates to coniferous sawnwood, paper and paperboard other than newsprint, fibreboard and non-coniferous sawnwood. The unsustainable blue WF, which is much smaller, occurs in the USA, Russia. Nigeria, Canada and India, and mainly relates to fuelwood, paper and paperboard other than newsprint, sawnwood and fibreboard. This study increases our understanding of how forest evaporation flows link to the final consumption of wood products and contribute
Details
- Database :
- OAIster
- Notes :
- BC3 authors thank the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the project Modeling and analysis of low carbon transitions (MALCON, RTI2018-099858-A-I00), and the Spanish State Research Agency through María de Maeztu Excellence Unit accreditation 2018-2022 (Ref. MDM-2017-0714, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/) and Basque Government BERC 2022-2025 Programme. I. Cazcarro thanks the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (State Research Agency. 2019 Call for R+D+i) PID2019-106822RB-I0 “Multisectoral and multiregional models, innovation and dynamics, for economic, social and environmental sustainability. J.F. Schyns was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Earth@lternatives project, grant agreement No 834716). This article has been also a parallel study to one developed on land footprints under Letter of Agreement between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, UN-REDD Programme) and the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). BC3 authors thank the staff of the FAO and BC3 for their comments, discussions and suggestions related to forest data and policy. We are especially grateful to Malgorzata Buszko-Briggs and Tina Vahanen (FAO Forestry Department) for their contribution to frame and coordinate the research, and to Salar Tayyib, Daniela Di Filippo, Tomasz Filipczuk (FAO Statistics Division) and Arvydas Lebedys (FAO Forestry Department) for providing datasets and for their discussions and comments on data and methodological issues., English
- Publication Type :
- Electronic Resource
- Accession number :
- edsoai.on1405405868
- Document Type :
- Electronic Resource