Project: Total carbon balance of Swedish forestry sector: Evaluate guidelines for climate roadmap 2050
This project will result in a description of the baseline of the total carbon balance of the Swedish forestry sector, as a basis for the actions required to reach the goals of Sweden's climate roadmap 2050.
This project was concluded in 2019.
Project information
Project manager
Bishnu Chandra Poudel
Other project members
Professor Johan Bergh, Linnaeus University; Associate Professor Göran Berndes, Chalmers; Professor Tomas Lundmark, SLU
Financier
Formas (the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning)
Timetable
1 Jan 2017-31 Dec 2019
Subject
Forestry and Wood Technology (Department of Forestry and Wood
Technology, Faculty of Technology)
Read the press release about the project, "Wide analysis of the Swedish forestry sector's carbon balance will be a support towards the Climate Roadmap 2050".
More about the project
The Swedish government's goal of reaching zero net greenhouse gas emission has come through a commitment of Roadmap 2050. It will require significant efforts to achieve the goal of Roadmap 2050 to bring the vision into the reality. A bio-based economy is proposed to achieve this goal, where a large amount of renewable raw materials and their sustainable production and use is required. The Swedish forestry sector is expected to make large contributions to reach this target, which will require implementing crucial decisions and activities.
Swedish forestry in this regard has a major role to assure supply of the forest resources, while at the same time to provide new perspectives for future pathways. The scientific challenge today is to understand how different management systems and the use of forest biomass may make the greatest climate benefit. In a country like Sweden, where more than 60 % of Sweden's land area consists of forests, we need to explain how the forest management strategies are crucial for climate benefits and Sweden's carbon balance. With this in perspective, it is very crucial to know how much forest products we can supply to satisfy the demand from different sectors and how this can contribute in the future to meet Roadmap 2050.
In order to understand and describe the role of forests in climate benefits, it is important to expand the analyses to include the forestry sector as a whole. By doing this, we will not only know how forestry affects the amount of carbon sequestered and stored in forests, but also the production of bioenergy and other forest products used to replace fossil fuels and energy intensive products such as concrete and aluminium. It will not be enough to look at the carbon balance of a forest stand; it needs a larger scale to understand the effects in different geographic and time scales.
The overall objective of the project is to describe the baseline of the total carbon balance of the Swedish forestry sector as a result from the assessments in forest ecosystem, forest products carbon stock, material and energy use of forest based raw materials and waste and recycling of used forest products. The system analysis approach – looking at forestry as a system – will be used for the assessments in aforementioned sectors. Leading experts will join together to calculate, analyze and evaluate the total carbon balance of the system to be defined as the climate benefit of the system. This will also explain the dynamics of climate benefits of the Swedish forestry sector for the future to assess reaching the target of Roadmap 2050.
The project is part of the research in the Forest Management and Forest Economics research fields.