EU mitigation potential of harvested wood products

The new rules for the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry sector under the Kyoto Protocol recognized the importance of Harvested Wood Products (HWP) in climate change mitigation. Forests and the forest sector play a relevant role in the carbon (C) cycle and can significantly contribute to the mitigation of global climate change. Specifically, forest-related mitigation options include a change in C stocks - which reflects emissions or removals of CO2 from the atmosphere - and a substitution effect. Changes in C stocks can happen both within the forest pools (living biomass, dead wood, litter and soil) and in the harvested wood products (HWP) pool. Substitution effects can occur when wood products replace materials or energy (e.g., concrete or fossil fuels). Given the trade-offs between the forest sink at large scale, wood products and bioenergy (see for example [6-9]), the most effective forest mitigation strategy is the one that maximizes the sum of various mitigation components.