The Impact of Forest Management Success Rates on the Net Carbon Benefits of Using Timber in Construction

The climate emergency calls for carbon drawdown to be applied at scale to offset the ‘hard to abate’ emission reductions that threaten Net Zero. The use of biogenic materials in construction promises benefits in terms of low embodied carbon (EC), but timber harvested today only sequestered atmospheric carbon (AC) in the past . A reduction in future AC concentration is only possible from today, and harvesting timber harms a forest’s ability to sequester carbon in the future, unless a level of afforestation can be guaranteed. Current Whole Life Carbon (WLC) assessment methodologies confuse the perceived value of past sequestration, making it seem equivalent to EC, or implying a guarantee of future AC. This study seeks to connect these two opposing elements by finding a forest management ‘success’ value (F S ) at which harvesting losses are outweighed by future sequestration, and a net benefit (in future AC terms) can be justifiably claimed. The research proposes a measure of forestry success (a standard established in terms of net sequestration per hectare) and cumulatively offsets losses through harvest against additional drawdown achieved in a well-managed forest. The results show that current boreal forest management regimes do not guarantee a net benefit, but that only modest improvements from a contemporary baseline would be required to see a net benefit by 2050. Recommendations are made to establish a carbon-focused standard for forestry management to replace current binary sustainability accreditations.