Improving the Contribution of Forests to Carbon Neutrality under Different Policies—A Case Study from the Hamburg Metropolitan Area

Leam Martes and Michael Köhl
Additional contact information
Leam Martes: Institute for Wood Science-World Foresty, Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), Universiät Hamburg, 21031 Hamburg, Germany
Michael Köhl: Institute for Wood Science-World Foresty, Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN), Universiät Hamburg, 21031 Hamburg, Germany

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-12

Abstract: As various political initiatives have set goals to reach net-zero emissions by the mid-21st century, forests will play an important role as a carbon sink for sequestering unavoidable emissions. Forest management can take two approaches by either decreasing harvest and enlarging the forest carbon stock or increasing harvest to increase carbon uptake and create harvested wood products (HWPs). Currently, these two management options seem at odds with seemingly conflicting policy directives being written. We used the BEKLIFUH model to assess six management scenarios based on carbon offset potential taking into consideration forest carbon, HWPs and the material and energetic substitution effects. The results show that while conservation leads to a higher above-ground carbon pool, including HWPs, material and energetic substitution leads to more overall carbon offsets for management scenarios with more timber harvesting. With compromise being possible by selectively conserving old growth forests with a high biodiversity value. In conclusion, if the forest sector decouples GHG reporting from forest management and includes all the secondary effects of timber harvest, this new approach can lead to a different cost–benefit analysis for the choice between harvest vs. conservation. This could result in a paradigm shift to a future where biodiversity and carbon neutrality can coexist.

Keywords: carbon offset; carbon pool; harvested wood products; substitution effect; net-zero emissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/4/2088/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/4/2088/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:4:p:2088-:d:747701

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().