Carbon Sequestration Due to Commercial Forestry: An Equilibrium Analysis

Abstract Carbon sequestration is one of the tools being used to respond to climate change risks. It is known that carbon stored in wood products is a type of sequestration. However, time frames for evaluating wood use can affect conclusions about sequestration benefits; a long-term perspective and large spatial scale may help clarify these issues. Therefore, I undertook an equilibrium analysis of ongoing commercial forestry operations, relative to carbon sequestration, at the landscape scale. I found that for simple exponential decay functions for wood remaining in use over time, the total sequestered wood at equilibrium is simply the integral of the decay function multiplied by wood product produced. I show that this simple multiplier is a linear function of half-life. For a 50-year wood half-life, this equilibrium multiplier is 72.1. The half-life depends on the specific wood product (lumber, etc.). For waste wood used for energy at mills, typical values yielded a 100-year sequestration (avoided emissions) value of 12H where H is tons of carbon in logs delivered to the mill. This exercise demonstrates that commercial forestry is a significant provider of carbon sequestration through wood products, in addition to other sequestration benefits. The simple multipliers developed here are intuitive and can be easily used with operational wood product data at any scale.