This August, a cross-disciplinary team led by Bruce Lippke, of the University of Washington, published an unusually far-reaching review of research on lifecycle carbon accounting, “to show the extent to which recent research findings on life cycle carbon accounting across all stages of processing, from cradle-to-grave, can identify opportunities for carbon mitigation improvement, which can contribute to global carbon objectives and national energy independence objectives. Focus is given to measurement systems that can infer where findings are robust, as well as determine if and where uncertainties are large enough to question key assumptions that impact forest-management practices, and the many ways wood is used.”
The 30-page report, Life cycle impacts of forest management and wood utilization on carbon mitigation: knowns and unknowns, is available at http://www.corrim.org/pubs/articles/2011/FSG_Review_Carbon_Synthesis.pdf.
The report, published by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, does a good deal to expand the frame of reference that the Manomet Center’s June 2010 Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study relies on; for instance, from the Lippke team’s report’s second page: “A review of current carbon policies indicates that many consider only the impacts on a limited set of carbon pools and frequently produce untended consequences on other impacted carbon pools We consider the difficulty in looking more deeply at large scale dynamic change such as covered by ‘consequential life cycle assessments’ driven by behavioral economic relationships that could incentivize forest management and product substitution.”
The Manomet Study, with its concept of a “carbon debt” in the atmosphere that various systems of energy conversion, biomass utilization, and forest management must “pay off” over shorter or longer periods, has had much-criticized difficulties with the concept of lifecycle analysis. Without actually using the term “carbon debt,” the Lippke team’s report points out that “While much has been made about this time sensitivity—that burning wood is worse than letting it decay—the longer term benefits of sustainable wood production displacing fossil fuel-emissions rotation after rotation far outweigh any short-term impact.”
—Submitted by Neil Ward, Director of Communication, Forest Resources Association.
