Carbon stored in harvested wood products (HWPs) can affect national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories, in which the production and end use of HWPs play a key role. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides guidance on HWP carbon accounting, which is sensitive to future developments of socioeconomic factors including population, income, and trade. We estimated the carbon stored within HWPs from 1961 to 2065 for 180 countries following IPCC carbon-accounting guidelines, consistent with Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAOSTAT) historical data and plausible futures outlined by the shared socioeconomic pathways. We found that the global HWP pool was a net annual sink of 335 Mt of CO2 equivalent (CO2e)⋅y−1 in 2015, offsetting substantial amounts of industrial processes within some countries, and as much as 441 Mt of CO2e⋅y−1 by 2030 under certain socioeconomic developments. Furthermore, there is a considerable sequestration gap (71 Mt of CO2e⋅y−1 of unaccounted carbon storage in 2015 and 120 Mt of CO2e⋅y−1 by 2065) under current IPCC Good Practice Guidance, as traded feedstock is ineligible for national GHG inventories. However, even under favorable socioeconomic conditions, and when accounting for the sequestration gap, carbon stored annually in HWPs is <1% of global emissions. Furthermore, economic shocks can turn the HWP pool into a carbon source either long-term—e.g., the collapse of the USSR—or short-term—e.g., the US economic recession of 2008/09. In conclusion, carbon stored within end-use HWPs varies widely across countries and depends on evolving market forces.

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Annually, nearly 500 gigatonnes of CO2 are exchanged between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere, and this exchange is clearly affected by human activities related to the Earth's forests. Governments are therefore willing to draft legislation incentivizing forest activities that sequester carbon to combat climate change. In this review, we examine issues related to the creation of carbon offset credits through forest conservation, burning of wood biomass in lieu of fossil fuels, and intensive commercial management that accounts for all carbon fluxes, including postharvest. In doing so, we study the costs of monitoring, measuring, and contracting; the principal-agent problem; and questions related to life cycle analyses of CO2. We can only conclude that greater care is likely needed in the future to identify carbon offsets from forestry activities if these are to be traded in emissions markets.

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