JRC study on harvested forest area: resolving key misunderstandings

Grassi, Giacomo; Cescatti, Alessandro; Ceccherini, Guido

doi:10.3832/ifor0059-014

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The role of wood harvest and its recent trends in Europe is a controversial topic in the discussion on forest-related climate change mitigation (see e.g. [ 59 – 62 ]). Reducing harvesting is one of the rare alternatives available that has an immediate impact on the forest sinks in the short to medium term (i.e., few decades).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of forests in the EU climate policy: are we on the right track?

Korosuo

Pilli

Viñas

et al. 2023

Carbon Balance Manage

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Background The European Union (EU) has committed to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. This requires a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and ensuring that any remaining emissions are balanced through CO2 removals. Forests play a crucial role in this plan: they are currently the main option for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and additionally, wood use can store carbon durably and help reduce fossil emissions. To stop and reverse the decline of the forest carbon sink, the EU has recently revised the regulation on land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), and set a target of − 310 Mt CO2e net removals for the LULUCF sector in 2030. Results In this study, we clarify the role of common concepts in forest management – net annual increment, harvest and mortality – in determining the forest sink. We then evaluate to what extent the forest sink is on track to meet the climate goals of the EU. For this assessment we use data from the latest national GHG inventories and a forest model (Carbon Budget Model). Our findings indicate that on the EU level, the recent decrease in increment and the increase in harvest and mortality are causing a rapid drop in the forest sink. Furthermore, continuing the past forest management practices is projected to further decrease the sink. Finally, we discuss options for enhancing the sinks through forest management while taking into account adaptation and resilience. Conclusions Our findings show that the EU forest sink is quickly developing away from the EU climate targets. Stopping and reversing this trend requires rapid implementation of climate-smart forest management, with improved and more timely monitoring of GHG fluxes. This enhancement is crucial for tracking progress towards the EU’s climate targets, where the role of forests has become – and is expected to remain – more prominent than ever before.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of forests in the EU climate policy: are we on the right track?

Korosuo

Pilli

Viñas

et al. 2023

Carbon Balance Manage

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“…The undocumented change in the Global Forest Change -GFC (Hansen et al 2013) algorithm between 2015 and 2016 has been already confirmed in Palahì et al (2021) and more recently in a GFC blog (GFC, 2021). The impact of that change on harvest statistics has been assessed and reported for the first time in our rebuttal and accompanying documents (i.e., Grassi et al 2021a;Ceccherini et al 2021).…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 98%

Potentials and limitations of NFIs and remote sensing in the assessment of harvest rates: a reply to Breidenbach et al.

Ceccherini

Duveiller

Grassi

et al. 2022

Annals of Forest Science

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The timely and accurate monitoring of forest resources is becoming of increasing importance in light of the multi-functionality of these ecosystems and their increasing vulnerability to climate change. Remote sensing observations of tree cover and systematic ground observations from National Forest Inventories (NFIs) represent the two major sources of information to assess forest area and use. The specificity of two methods is calling for an in-depth analysis of their strengths and weaknesses and for the design of novel methods emerging from the integration of satellite and surface data. On this specific debate, a recent paper by Breidenbach et al. published in this journal suggests that the detection of a recent increase in EU forest harvest rate—as reported in Nature by Ceccherini et al.—is largely due to technical limitations of satellite-based mapping. The article centers on the difficulty of the approaches to estimate wood harvest based on remote sensing. However, it does not discuss issues with the robustness of validation approaches solely based on NFIs. Here we discuss the use of plot data as a validation set for remote sensing products, discussing potentials and limitations of both NFIs and remote sensing, and how they can be used synergistically. Finally, we highlight the need to collect in situ data that is both relevant and compatible with remote sensing products within the European Union.

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