How to assess the contribution of forests and wood use to climate change mitigation: Navigating through a controversial debate

Climate change mitigation is a top political priority, to which forests and wood use can contribute, e.g. as a ‘nature-based solution’. Currently, however, there are different views on how to assess these contributions, leading to contradictory recommendations for forest policy and management. This commentary illustrates the complexity of the climate change mitigation contributions of forests and wood use and highlights key points for their assessment. These include (1) to consider the forestry system holistically by taking the interactions of the subsystems forest carbon sequestration and storage, wood product storage, and potential substitution into account, (2) to present forest development and product life cycles dynamically to better align forest management and wood use with short-, medium-, and long-term climate change mitigation goals, (3) to avoid using generic substitution factors which can lead to significant errors, (4) to consider markets to identify consumption changes and leakage effects, (5) to communicate uncertainties transparently to demonstrate the reliability of the results and conclusions to decision-makers, and (6) to develop scenarios with the involvement of various stakeholders to contribute to understanding differing perspectives. However, climate change mitigation is only one of many services provided by forests and must therefore be reconciled with other services (e.g. wood supply, biodiversity conservation), as well as with the adaptation of forests and their management to global climate change. The existing evidence on the climate change mitigation potential of forests and forestry suggests that without further greenhouse gas reductions in other sectors, the climate change mitigation targets cannot be achieved.