Calculations of climate impact and carbon balances in Swedish forestry
Mistra Digital Forest has produced two reports with calculations of climate impact and carbon balances in Swedish forestry.
Background
Forests play a major role in the Earth's carbon balance and climate, not least in a forest country like Sweden, where 70 per cent of the land is covered by forest. The Swedish forests are actively managed and create various types of benefits for residents and for the Swedish economy. Therefore, it is important to study how forestry affects the climate benefits of forests, and to gain a greater understanding of how climate benefits can be further increased. There are two ways to address these issues. One way is to start with the products manufactured from forest raw materials and calculate their climate impact. Another approach is to start with the forest and consider how various forestry measures affect the carbon balance and, by extension, the climate.
In this Mistra Digital Forest project, IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute and Skogforsk use these two methods to estimate how Swedish forestry contributes to Swedish, and to European climate targets.
The methods are applied to the forestry practices in Sveaskog's productive forests in different parts of Sweden. The aim of the project has been to provide Sveaskog, as a raw material supplier, with an appreciation of what the carbon balances are like in their own operations, and in deliveries to customers. The calculations in the methods are primarily based on detailed data on Sveaskog's holdings and forestry, supplemented by standardised estimates where data is not available. Detailed data most likely results in more accurate calculations - the challenge is that access to this type of data is currently limited.
About the methods
Method 1: Calculation of climate impact
IVL's and SLU's calculations of the climate impact of the production of forest raw materials are based on the methodology developed within Mistra Digital Forest, primarily for integration into the BioMapp visualisation tool. BioMapp is a tool that visualises material flows from forestry, and shows how sustainability is affected in each part of the value chain. The calculations are based on the methodology used in Sweden's international climate reporting for the land use sector, LULUCF (Land Use, Land-use Change and Forestry). The calculations cover the climate impact from forestry operations, through to the landing of forest raw materials at the roadside.
Method 2: Calculation of carbon balances
This method is instead based on the forestry measures and uses a newly developed methodology to calculate carbon balances in Swedish forestry. By starting with detailed data from different regions in Sveaskog's holdings, the method can take into account how forestry is carried out and how this affects the carbon balance. In this way, the method can be a complement to the current LCA, which does not include these calculations. The calculations made using this method cover carbon balances from the standing forest, as well as forestry operations through to the delivery of raw material products at the gates of industry.
Both methods cover forestry and forest development throughout one year. Neither of the methods include the substitution effects of allowing forest raw materials to replace fossil raw materials, the reason being that there is no consensus on the methods to be used for this type of calculation. However, substitution effects are included as a potential option in BioMapp, where method 1 is included.
Conclusions
Both methods arrive at similar overall conclusions:
The calculations for Sveaskog's productive forests show a significant uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into forest ecosystems. The results apply to Sveaskog's productive forests in all regions. The calculations in method 1 also show that the uptake of carbon dioxide is greater in Sveaskog's forests in Götaland and Svealand compared with reference forestry in the region as a whole.
The fossil emissions of greenhouse gases connected to forestry are generally much lower in absolute terms than the biogenic uptake of carbon dioxide.
Regional differences in Sweden arise because both forests and forestry practices vary in different parts of the country.