Russian forests: A new approach to the assessment of carbon stocks and sequestration capacity

Abstract

The controversy over how to improve the carbon balance assessment for the Russian national forests is discussed. According to the preliminary calculations, three factors are responsible for the underestimation of the carbon sink in Russian forests, up to ≈ 340 ± 75 million tons per year in total: 1. The methodology of assessments. 2. The methodological ambiguity of forest classification, which excludes some areas from managed forests and therefore from assessment, for instance, ≈ 200 million ha of “inaccessible” forests in remote regions and 74.9 million ha of shrubs. 3. The evaluation of the carbon balance for the latest national inventory report under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol (National inventory report of the Russian Federation on greenhouse gas emissions and removals, 2006), which doubled the carbon losses caused by timber harvest and wood removal and overestimated the forest fire losses.The new results for the Russian forests carbon sink assessment corrected according to the discussed approach and based on the State Forest Register data following the IPCC methodology are presented in this paper. This assessment for the 2015 Net Ecosystem Production (NEP) of the Russian forests is 630 ± 110 million tons С/year, including approximately 140 million tons/year accumulated in dead biomass.It must be emphasized that the carbon sequestration capacity assessment of Russian forests presented here is the result of research and has no official status yet.