think climate. think change.
Department of Climate Change
Jaakko Pöyry Consulting, September 2000
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The treatment of carbon stored in wood products for national carbon accounting purposes is an important carbon accounting issue. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Default Approach assumes that all carbon in trees is emitted at the time trees are harvested. In practice, a proportion of the harvest is removed and stored in a range of wood products. For many wood products, this carbon may be stored for a long period. A shift towards the increased use of wood products, particularly those with a long decay period, is one method of increasing the size of the pool of sequestered carbon. The alternative strategy for sequestration, growing forests only to lock up carbon in the biomass, misses the opportunity to store carbon in wood products while new carbon is sequestered into biomass.
Jaakko Pöyry Consulting was engaged by the Australian Greenhouse Office to look at the size of the pools in wood products and to consider Australia's position under various wood product accounting approaches.
