Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
Carbon Losses Due to Wood Harvesting
and the Role of Wood Products
Marco Marchetti, Gherardo Chirici and Bruno Lasserre
Abstract
The carbon stock in wood and paper products is increasing in Italy, and
the same trend is expected in the coming decades. In forest ecosystems firewood
and forest harvesting represent a net carbon loss but the use of wood, a carbon-
neutral renewable resource for generating energy also has a strong substitution
effect as it avoids the use of fossil fuels which are highly CO
2
emitting. The use
of wood for construction purposes, substituting traditional materials, tends to
increase carbon sequestration and contributes to climate change mitigation. The
application of the GHGs accounting methods (IPCC
2003
) suffers in Italy both for
the lack of accuracy of wood harvesting official statistics and for the high level of
uncertainty in the definition of wood products lifespan. Many authors have demon-
strated a large underestimation of clear cuts areas in Italy leading to an underesti-
mation of carbon loss due to a harvesting of about 2 Mt annually. However, it has
been recently proved that multitemporal high resolution remotely sensed images
may be operatively used with a probabilistic sampling procedure to obtain a more
reliable estimation of annual wood harvesting extents. In any case an increase of
the use of wood products for energy, building and furniture purposes may contrib-
ute to the reduction of GHG emissions and to a more sustainable development.
7.1 Introduction
In the last decades the need for the development of valuable measures for the miti-
gation of GHGs emissions and their effect on climate change significantly influ-
enced research in the forest sector. In fact, forests may significantly contribute in
