title: EU mitigation potential of harvested wood products.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  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. We used the Tier 2 method proposed in the 2013 IPCC KP Supplement to estimate emissions and removals from HWP from 1990 to 2030 in EU-28 countries with three future harvest scenarios (constant historical average, and +/-20% in 2030).
  
  
  RESULTS
  For the historical period (2000-2012) our results are consistent with other studies, indicating a HWP sink equal on average to -44.0 Mt CO2yr-1(about 10% of the sink by forest pools). Assuming a constant historical harvest scenario and future distribution of the total harvest among each commodity, the HWP sink decreases to -22.9 Mt CO2yr-1in 2030. The increasing and decreasing harvest scenarios produced a HWP sink of -43.2 and -9.0 Mt CO2yr-1in 2030, respectively. Other factors may play an important role on HWP sink, including: (i) the relative share of different wood products, and (ii) the combined effect of production, import and export on the domestic production of each commodity.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Maintaining a constant historical harvest, the HWP sink will slowly tend to saturate, i.e. to approach zero in the long term. The current HWP sink will be maintained only by further increasing the current harvest; however, this will tend to reduce the current sink in forest biomass, at least in the short term. Overall, our results suggest that: (i) there is limited potential for additional HWP sink in the EU; (ii) the HWP mitigation potential should be analyzed in conjunction with other mitigation components (e.g. sink in forest biomass, energy and material substitution by wood).
authors.affiliation: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA Italy.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pilli
authors.affiliation: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA Italy.
authors.forename: Giulia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fiorese
authors.affiliation: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, VA Italy.
authors.forename: Giacomo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Grassi
keywords: Carbon; FAOSTAT; Harvested wood products (HWP); LULUCF