News Brief
Report on Harvested Wood Products Workshop Held in Rotorua 12-16 February 2001
In February this year the New Zealand government sponsored an informal international workshop on the topic of Harvested Wood Products (HWP) in Rotorua. The aim of this workshop was to support activities related to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol.
The government's interest in harvested wood products results from a requirement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, for New Zealand to prepare a national greenhouse gas inventory of human-induced emissions by sources, and removals by sinks.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) default approach used for this process assumes there is no change in the stocks of carbon in wood products and therefore that "all carbon in biomass harvested is emitted to the atmosphere in the removal year".
However, the IPCC Guidelines permit the inclusion of harvested products in national inventories "to account for increases in the pool of forest products", although the accounting methods to be utilised for reporting are not yet specified.
In an attempt to include the full atmospheric impacts of HWP, the meeting agreed that the application of the IPCC default accounting approach may not capture the atmospheric impact of HWP and may not provide a direct incentive for the long-term storage of carbon in wood products.
It was proposed that the FAO forest product database, which covers the period 1961-1999, was a potential starting point for determining estimates and was available to all participating countries.
Utilising the data contained in the FAO forest product database and dividing HWP into the three categories identified in Table 1, when taking into account imports and exports, allowed for the estimation of the atmospheric impacts of HWP in the New Zealand environment.
| Product life (years) | Product type |
| Long life 40 - 60 | Softwood sawnwood, Hardwood sawnwood, Veneer sheets, Plywood |
| Medium life 15 - 30 | Particleboard (including OSB), Fibreboard, Fibreboard compressed, Medium density fibreboard, Hardboard, Insulating board |
| Short life 1 - 3 | Wood pulp, Recovered paper, Newsprint, Printing and writing, Household and sanitary, Wrapping and packaging, Other paper and paperboard |
Table 1: Examples of Aggregated Forest Product Categories and Possible Life Times
It is recognised that product lifetimes will vary both regionally and over time. Where national information is available on product lifetimes, this data could be substituted for the default values.
Recognising that there are limitations to the above system, there are considerable areas of further research required into topics such as:
- the magnitude/scale and source of HWP and their changes over time;
- the assessment of HWP stock changes at a global level as a means of determining the validity of the IPCC default;
- the trade flow implications of the various approaches;
- the lifetimes of products and product pools;
- the carbon content of products and product pools;
- the disposition after use (landfill, burning, decay, recycling); and
- the rate and proportion of carbon emitted from landfills as methane and carbon dioxide.
As a result of this workshop New Zealand has undertaken to co-ordinate an international collaboration of the implementation of the above method. Of the 52 participants representing 17 countries, Canada, Chile, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the US forest industry sector have undertaken to contribute to the collaboration by looking at a series of case studies to test the methodology. Australia and France have signalled interest and a desire for possible future inclusion.
It is anticipated that this collaboration will be used to contribute to the formal processes within the framework of the IPCC and FCCC.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry acknowledges the assistance of Forest
Research, the Ministry for the Environment and the New Zealand Forest Industries Council
in hosting this event.
Contact: Andrew Wilson at MAF Policy, Rotorua
Phone 07 348 0089, E-mail: wilsona@maf.govt.nz
Contact for Enquiries
Amber Duncalfe
Editor - RM Update
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Tel: +64 4 894 0710
Fax: +64 4 894 0745
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