Nature – Peng et al. (2023): The carbon costs of global wood harvests
Liqing Peng, Timothy D. Searchinger, Jessica Zionts, Richard Waite IN: Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06187-1
Many approaches give the impression of low, zero or even negative greenhouse gas emissions from wood harvests because, in different ways, they offset carbon losses from new harvests with carbon sequestration from growth of broad forest areas. Attributing this sequestration to new harvests is inappropriate because this other forest growth would occur regardless of new harvests and typically results from agricultural abandonment, recovery from previous harvests and climate change itself. Nevertheless some papers count gross emissions annually, which assigns no value to the capacity of newly harvested forests to regrow and approach the carbon stocks of unharvested forests. Here, the authors present results of a new model that uses time discounting to estimate the present and future carbon costs of global wood harvests under different scenarios.