Nature Communications (Jun 2021)

Commercial afforestation can deliver effective climate change mitigation under multiple decarbonisation pathways

  • Eilidh J. Forster,
  • John R. Healey,
  • Caren Dymond,
  • David Styles

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24084-x
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1
pp. 1 – 12

Abstract

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Afforestation is an important greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation strategy but the efficacy of commercial (harvested) forestry is disputed. Here the authors apply dynamic life cycle assessment to show that new commercial conifer forests can achieve up to 269% more GHG mitigation than semi-natural forests, over 100 years.