Carbon stored in harvested wood products in Turkey and projections for 2020

Abstract

Turkey is an Annex-I country under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and therefore submits its Greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and removals from anthropogenic sources to the UNFCCC secretariat on an annual basis, through a National GHG Inventory Report (NIR). GHG emissions and removals from Land Use, Land Use and Forestry (LULUCF) constitute one of the main sectors in this report. One of the major land use categories in this sector is Forestland, and harvests in this category must be considered as a direct GHG emission to the atmosphere, unless the fate of the Harvested Wood Products (HWP) is reported. In this study, we estimated the carbon sequestration in the HWP category of the Turkish NIR, according to the 2006 Guidelines for GHG inventory in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector, from the International Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC). This is the first time such an estimate of carbon stocks and carbon stock changes in the HWP pool has been carried out in Turkey. The calculation has been done in Tier 2. We used United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Timber database disaggregated figures for HWP produced in Turkey from 1964 to 2013. We focused on the two main HWP categories, which are sawnwood and wood-based panels. Comparing UNECE data series with Orman Genel Müdürlügü (OGM, the Republic of Turkey, General Directorate of Forestry) data series for industrial roundwood over 1976-2013 (starting date for OGM data series), we noticed some anomalies (with UNECE data series as a basis: max: +47%, min = -23%, mean = +16%). Thus, the UNECE data on sawnwood and wood based panels were corrected based on OGM data. These anomalies could be due to: (i) use of volume over bark for UNECE and volume under bark for OGM (+15% for volume over bark), and (ii) integration of industrial roundwood coming from the private sector for UNECE. In order to ensure coherence, we then corrected the 1976-2013 UNECE data series for sawnwood and wood-based panels production taking into account for each year the percentage of anomaly. However, from 1976 to 1982, the anomalies are much reduced (-1% in average), which allow using the UNECE data series from 1964 to 1975. We estimated the average share of each HWP over the last ten years: 48% for sawnwood and 38% for wood-based panels. The 14% of other HWP are not considered in the analysis, either because they are short-lived products or marginal or difficult to estimate. A projection of HWP has been done until 2020 based on 2 alternative scenarios based on OGM strategy documents: intensive harvesting and extensive harvesting. For each scenario, intensive vs extensive, we disaggregated the 2013-2020 volume of industrial roundwood into the two HWPs, using the calculated percentages. The results of our analysis revealed that the HWP pool can add 3.14 Gg CO2 eq yr-1 additional removal to LULUCF sector in the GHG inventory of Turkey for 2013 compared to 1990. The amount of contribution is estimated to rise up to 13.70 Mt CO2 eq yr-1, and 10.99 Mt CO2 eq yr-1 for intensive and extensive scenarios that are developed based on OGM strategic plans in 2020.

Keywords

• Climate change mitigation
• national GHG inventory
• harvested wood products