Institut für Waldschutz
The carbon sink of forests and wood products are two important factors of negative emissions in Germany and play a crucial role in achieving climate neutrality, especially by providing durable wood products for the construction sector. However, forests also face climate impacts, pests and diseases, which have increased dramatically in recent years and led to significant amounts of damaged forests, affecting the availability and price of wood products. This interaction between forest damage and its mitigation potential is particularly important in a overshoot scenario, where strongly negative emissions are needed in the long term to offset the higher emissions at the beginning of the century, which are also likely to be accompanied by more severe extreme events affecting forests. Existing official projections of the German forest and wood product sink have so far been based on statistical modeling approaches that neglect climate effects and forest pests and therefore can neither capture these complex interactions nor provide a range of uncertainty for future negative emission potential projections. The aim of ForestOvershoot is therefore to investigate the interactions between forest damage, changes in forest management and the increasing use of wood in the construction sector on the provision of negative emissions from the forest and wood product sink in the short, medium and long term.
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
