Carbon stock in wood products: implications for carbon accounting at national and local scale in Italy

Abstract

The international climate change adaptation strategies provide the opportunity to account for carbon sinks in forests through the Kyoto Protocol. Globally, forests and wood products are considered important carbon sinks. Harvested Wood Products (HWPs) are receiving growing attention, considering their potentialities to be included in national Greenhouse Gas Inventories with practical and economic implications for both carbon accounting and timber market. In Italy, understanding the contribution of HWPs to the total carbon budget may have a positive role to further improve forest management and planning approaches, as well as the timber production (i.e. wood-energy chain), specifically oriented to the climate change mitigation and ecosystem adaptation. This work aims to deeper assess the main barriers and drivers for the HWPs implementation within the carbon accounting framework in Italy. After a preliminary survey on how climate adaptation policies are currently implemented at global and national scale, this work specifically addresses the most important opportunities to include the HWPs in carbon accounting for the forestry sector at landscape scales. Finally, this work mainly outlines the following challenges for including HWPs in forest management and planning processes at local scale: (i) improving the assessment of forest carbon budget in different pools through using proper simulation tools, and environmental impact analysis; (ii) further developing robust policies and regulations that make the carbon accounting approach more explicit and economically relevant; and (iii) implementing adaptive approaches to effectively consider climate change mitigation strategies in decision-making processes at landscape scale.