Research snapshot: Balancing sustainability with carbon when it comes to forests mitigating climate change + facts about forest carbon

What question did researchers ask and why?

Ontario’s forests store lots of carbon, and researchers and others are interested in making sure they continue to store lots of carbon in the future to help slow climate change.

But while using forests to mitigate climate change is important, OFRI scientists wanted to investigate the tradeoffs that could occur if forests’ ability to store carbon was maximized.

So OFRI’s Steve Colombo, Jiaxin Chen, and Michael Ter-Mikaelian (along with Phil Elkie of MNR’s Policy Division and others at the University of Toronto and the USDA Forest Service) decided to investigate how a forest protection scenario might compare with others that involve harvesting.

What did they do?

Ontario's forests help mitigate climate change by storing large amounts of carbon in trees and soil.

They used computer models to assess how contrasting management objectives would affect the tradeoffs between sustainability and carbon storage in a 3.4 million hectare area of forest in northeastern Ontario. The scenarios were:

1. protection (no harvest, fire suppressed)
2. harvest (wood removed at a sustainable rate, fire suppressed, large area protected)
3. the natural forest

The researchers used forest age class and species composition as indicators of sustainability. They predicted future forest condition under each scenario using Ontario’s timber supply model (SFMM) and predicted carbon stored in forests and wood products using the FORCARB-ON model. 

What did they learn? 

1. Under the protection scenario, forests stored more carbon, but it increased only in the first 30 years of the modelling period. After that, their ability to store carbon was saturated, and any more additions were offset by natural losses.
2. Over the long term, forests under the harvest scenario had the carbon edge over both the protection and natural scenarios. After 100 years, harvesting resulted in more carbon being locked into long-lived wood products such as furniture and buildings, plus a new forest grew up and took in more carbon.
3. While the protection scenario resulted in the most carbon stored in the first few decades, it lacked younger age classes, because all disturbances were prevented.
4. The sustainable harvesting rate did a better job of providing ecological benefits (because it had a natural age class structure), while in the long term storing the most carbon.

Who can use these research results?

 
Those who are involved in writing policy and plans for forest management and climate change mitigation, as well as those who are studying climate change and forests.

Where to get more information:

See Forest Protection and Forest Harvest as Strategies for Ecological Sustainability and Climate Change Mitigation (Forest Ecology and Management), available from OFRI, or contact Steve Colombo at OFRI.
  

Did you know...? Facts about forest carbon

Wood products such as furniture can lock up carbon for decades or even centuries!

• Carbon is a chemical element that is a key building block for life on Earth, from microbes to plants to animals to people. It is found in all living things.
• The atmosphere contains large amounts of carbon, primarily in the form of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas that is naturally present in the atmosphere, trapping heat from the sun and making life on Earth possible.
• Carbon continuously flows among the ocean, land, and the atmosphere, as part of the natural global carbon cycle.
• Forests are an important part of the global carbon cycle. They take in and store lots of carbon in soil, trees, and other "pools."
• What's more, products from harvested wood (buildings, furniture, paper, etc.) can lock away carbon for years, decades, or even centuries. Carbon returns from forests and wood products to the atmosphere through decomposition of dead wood materials and burning of wood (for example, through wildfire and energy production).
• Over the past 150 years, human activities such as burning fossil fuels (coal, gas, etc.) and deforestation have rapidly increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, altering the balance of the natural global carbon cycle and causing the climate to change rapidly.
• The amount of carbon stored in Ontario's forests can be increased by protecting forests from natural disturbances such as fire (which causes rapid release of greenhouse gases), increasing forest growth rates, converting non-forested areas to forests (afforestation), and avoiding deforestation.
• Another way people can use forests to help mitigate climate change is by using wood from sustainably managed forests in place of concrete and steel, the production of which results in more greenhouse gas emissions.

For more information about forest carbon, read Forest Carbon in Ontario.