New Research Questions Wooden Product Sustainability

The hardwood trade, and certainly all the wooden merchandise trade sector, has lengthy fought an uphill battle to raised inform most people, the media, and authorities policymakers concerning the sustainability and environmental friendliness of utilizing wooden in all its superb functions. Sadly, simply once we appear to be making progress, one other questionable report comes out that’s touted by those that would favor that our forestlands stay untouched and unmanaged. The World Useful resource Institute (WRI) is the most recent group to strike.

The WRI not too long ago launched a examine difficult scientific and public coverage claims that the wooden merchandise trade is a low or impartial emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG). Among the key assertions of the examine embrace:

• Present and future demand for wooden merchandise undermines efforts to scale back GHG emissions.
• Between 2010 and 2050, annual wooden harvests are anticipated to launch 3 times extra carbon dioxide than the worldwide aviation trade.
• Three million sq. miles of forestland are anticipated to be “razed” (the scale of the continental U.S.).
• A large accounting hole in international greenhouse gasoline manufacturing; netting carbon losses from new harvests with carbon sequestration from the expansion of broad forest areas is “inappropriate” and provides a misunderstanding of low, zero, and even adverse greenhouse gasoline emissions from wooden harvests.
• On one hand, not too long ago harvested timber can’t be included in carbon accounting since you can not assure these forests would have continued to develop.
• But, alternatively, they declare present progress will be attributed to previous harvests and land clearing.

The Hardwood Federation is in shut contact with our trade allies, working to place collectively a method to handle this declare. As a primary step, our pals on the Nationwide Alliance of Forest House owners developed some speaking factors to make use of with any members of Congress that will have questions. Key factors embrace:

• The examine ignores a strong, well-established physique of science exhibiting the other of their declare.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) has said, in contradiction to the report’s authors, that “in the long run, a sustainable forest administration technique geared toward sustaining or rising forest carbon shares, whereas producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fiber or vitality from the forest, will generate the biggest sustained mitigation profit.
• Eliminating forest harvest isn’t the answer to wholesome, vibrant forests. Harvesting on Nationwide Forests in Washington state was shut down for 30 years within the Nineteen Nineties. Forests have been freed from direct human exercise and administration. What occurred? In comparison with personal lands in Washington state, nationwide forests are rising half as a lot, and 70 % is misplaced to mortality.
• Cherry-picking science is harmful. The authors use worldwide forestry knowledge from particular areas to conclude for all forests globally misrepresented forestry harvest emissions and underrepresented the sequestration values of replanting and managing forests.
• Within the U.S., we don’t minimize and transfer on. We replant, regrow, and regenerate in a unending cycle. Non-public forest homeowners develop 43 % extra timber than they harvest annually.
• Felling a tree doesn’t trigger an emission. The carbon goes from being in a stay, standing tree to a log, then to a product.

Whereas these and different details can be utilized in response, it’s clear from previous debate that direct response from the trade is commonly seen as self-serving and doesn’t transfer the needle within the court docket of public opinion. Luckily, some students within the forest economics and modeling neighborhood have begun to reply to the examine. For instance, on August 8, Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental and useful resource economics at The Ohio State College, revealed a weblog posting entitled “Why International Wooden Harvests Aren’t Emitting 3.5 to 4.2 Gt CO2 Per Yr in Web Emissions.”

Professor Sohngen pushed again on a number of statements made within the WRI examine, together with the next:

• The authors claimed carbon price of harvesting is determined by “a counterfactual that assumes no harvesting in any respect,” and “their strategy and mannequin is mindless.”
• “They acknowledge economics is tough, so that they ignore it and as a substitute deploy a set of arbitrary guidelines to devour wooden, harvest timber, and regenerate timber.”
• Thus, “their key outcome that there are 3.5 to 4.2 Gt CO2 in web emissions from wooden harvesting is ridiculous.”
• Extra particularly, Professor Sohngen states that the authors get to their key outcome by means of a number of technical errors, together with:
  • “First, they ignore economics and assemble a purely biophysical
    mannequin. It will lead to overestimating harvests and underestimating regrowth…”
  • “Second, the WRI examine is simply an implementation of the inaccurate argument by Searchinger et al. (2009) that emissions from timber harvesting and burning needs to be double counted…Searchinger’s argument is incorrect. Double counting emissions, in contradiction to the proper strategy by the IPCC, results in much less, no more, forests.”
  • “Third, WRI is making a normative judgment…to disregard tree progress earlier than harvesting. This conference is completely different from each different forest sector mannequin.” (And this vastly overstates the carbon impacts of harvesting.)
  • “Fourth, their strategy to discounting is simply unusual…[and] amplifies their outcomes and ignores how markets reply…”
  • “Fifth, their counterfactual is unrealistic, and never simply because it assumes no wooden harvesting.” The issue is also that they run “a state of affairs of no harvesting of wooden with out contemplating the market response.”

After all, extra students, scientists, and environmentalists want to come back out and push again on this flawed reasoning, and we’re hopeful extra such work is within the pipeline. We are going to proceed to work intently with our allies and double our efforts to share the details concerning the wooden merchandise trade with coverage leaders in D.C. Hopefully, the speaking factors will mean you can push again in your native degree as nicely.

Dana Lee Cole is the manager director on the Hardwood Federation, a Washington, D.C.-based hardwood trade commerce affiliation that represents 1000’s of hardwood companies in each state in the US and acts because the trade advocacy voice on Capitol Hill. She will be reached at dana.cole@hardwoodfederation.com.