Sequestration of carbon in harvested wood products for the United States

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides guidelines for countries to report greenhouse gas removals by sinks and emissions from sources. These guidelines allow use of several accounting approaches when reporting the contribution of harvested wood products (HWP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Using extensions of methods suggested by the IPCC and a software model called WOODCARB II in Microsoft Excel®, this paper presents estimates of the U.S. HWP contribution to annual greenhouse gas removals in the agriculture, forestry, land use, and land use change sector. In 2005, the contribution to removals was 30 Tg (million metric tons) C (carbon) and 31 Tg C for the Production and Atmospheric Flow Approaches, respectively, and 44 Tg C for the Stock Change Approach. This range is 17 to 25 percent of C removals by forests, or would offset 42 percent to 61 percent of residential natural gas C emissions in 2005. The contribution has declined under the Production and Atmospheric Flow Approaches since 1990 and has increased under the Stock Change Approach. The Stock Change estimate has increased because it explicitly includes C in increasing net imports of wood and paper products. The contribution estimates were validated by adjusting the half-life of products in use in order to match independent estimates of carbon in housing in 2001 and annual wood and paper discards to solid-waste disposal sites (SWDS) during 1990 to 2001. Estimates of methane emissions from wood and paper in landfills were also checked against independent estimates of total landfill methane emissions. A Monte-Carlo simulation used to assess the effect of uncertainty in inputs suggests the 90 percent confidence interval for removal contribution estimates under the three approaches is within -23% to +19%.

[1]  D. Mckeever,et al.  Domestic market activity in solid wood products in the United States, 1950-1998. , 2002 .

[2]  Bernhard Schlamadinger,et al.  Forest Harvests and Wood Products: Sources and Sinks of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide , 1998, Forest Science.

[3]  R. Haynes An analysis of the timber situation in the United States: 1989-2040. A technical document supporting the 1989 USDA Forest Service RPA assessment. , 1990 .

[4]  Rachel P. Maines Garbage in the Cities: Refuse Reform and the Environment, 1880–1980. ByMartin V. Melosi (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981.xvi + 268 pp. $18.50) , 1983 .

[5]  H. Eggins,et al.  Biodeterioration and biodegradation , 1980 .

[6]  Morton A. Barlaz,et al.  Carbon storage during biodegradation of municipal solid waste components in laboratory‐scale landfills , 1998 .

[7]  An analysis of the timber situation in the United States : 1952 to 2050 , 2003 .

[8]  M. Barlaz,et al.  Biodegradability of Municipal Solid Waste Components in Laboratory-Scale Landfills , 1997 .

[9]  J. Howard,et al.  U.S. Timber Production, Trade, Consumption, and Price Statistics , 1999 .

[10]  R. Birdsey,et al.  Methods for calculating forest ecosystem and harvested carbon with standard estimates for forest types of the United States , 2006 .

[11]  Jessie A. Micales,et al.  The decomposition of forest products in landfills , 1997 .

[12]  LUMBER PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES 1799-1946 , 1951 .

[13]  Bruce Lippke,et al.  Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions related to the use, maintenance, and disposal of a residential structure. , 2005 .

[14]  Kenneth E. Skog,et al.  A Method Countries Can Use to Estimate Changes in Carbon Stored in Harvested Wood Products and the Uncertainty of Such Estimates , 2004 .

[15]  P. Ince Industrial wood productivity in the United States, 1900-1998. , 2000 .

[16]  INVENTORIES OF WOODY RESIDUES AND SOLID WOOD WASTE IN THE UNITED STATES, 2002 , 2004 .

[17]  O. Masera,et al.  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Ipcc/oecd/iea Programme on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories Evaluating Approaches for Estimating Net Emissions of Carbon Dioxide from Forest Harvesting and Wood Products Supporting Material Prepared within the Ipcc/oecd/iea National Greenhouse Gas Invento , 2022 .

[18]  K. Skog,et al.  Carbon Sequestration in Wood and Paper Products , 2001 .