Reply to: Carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management Timothy D. Searchinger, Steven Berry, Liqing Peng The critiqued study by two of the authors of this Reply uses the carbon harvest model (CHARM) to estimate carbon emissions from wood harvest as the carbon added to the atmosphere—fully accounting for silvicultural gains—relative to the carbon that forests would store if left alone. This comparison to no-human-activity is the standard approach for calculating emissions from burning oil, driving cars and other human actions, and is the same forestry-accounting approach used in land-use change models long relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Global Carbon Project and many other papers. In the accompanying Comment, Sohngen et al. reject this approach, arguing mainly that emissions of one activity should be compared with those in an economic counterfactual, which means the emissions produced by the economically estimated, most-likely alternative activities. Citing their previously published global timber model (GTM), they claim that new wood harvests “can reduce” atmospheric carbon, which means they are carbon negative. However, although economic models, when credible, can usefully project shifts in behaviour, they do not determine the emissions of these behaviours; by confusing emissions of one activity with emissions avoided by another, the approach by Sohngen et al. makes physical emissions disappear. We elaborate below and also explain how the GTM’s findings that economic forces offset new wood-use emissions by creating more forests stem from large misinterpretations of underlying studies (even by a factor of 75) and from modelling structures that largely assume their conclusions.
Does burning more wood lead to more forests & help the climate? In a new Nature paper, WRI & Yale researchers show such claims rely on flawed accounting and models, and misinterpret underlying studies.
Read the papers: rdcu.be/eNkXX
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