The Unece/Fao timber section (www.unece.org) will organize, jointly with the Swiss Confederation Federal Office for the Environment (Foen) and other partners a workshop on “Harvested wood products in the context of climate change policy”. The workshop will take place on 9-10 September 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland. The focus will be to provide high-level information for policy makers and other stakeholders on the role of wood products in fighting climate change. Measures and policies to increase the role of forest
products in climate change mitigation will be discussed and options and consequences of different choices for policy makers in the context of international negotiations will be reviewed.
Wood products can contribute to climate mitigation: long-lived wood products form a storage pool of wood-based carbon, and as raw material and energy source, wood can substitute for more energy-intensive materials and fossil fuels. So far, however, international climate policies have only provided the possibility to account for
carbon sinks in forests through the Kyoto Protocol. This concept is not supportive of sustainable forest management, as forest carbon sinks give incentives to increase the carbon stock of forests, increasing the risk of forest instability and thus of becoming a CO2 source. In contrast, accounting for harvested wood products (Hwp) could help encourage silvicultural measures without losing the value of the forest carbon sink.
While the value of Hwp is recognized by many countries, the diverging effects of the suggested accounting methods on national Greenhouse Gas inventories have postponed the inclusion of wood products in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Ongoing negotiations on the second commitment period open the way
for possible inclusion of Hwp.
