Modeling Carbon Sequestration In Harvested Wood Products

Carbon offset programs, such as that overseen by the California Air Resources Board (CA ARB), have emerged as a strategy for climate change mitigation. Offset projects sequestering carbon earn credits that can be traded on the Cap and Trade market to compensate for carbon emissions. The carbon stock embodied in harvested wood products can make up a substantial portion of the sequestered carbon in forest offset projects. In this paper, I investigate the sensitivity of the calculations for the number of credits allocated to a forest offset project. I also examine how alternative models for the decay of harvested wood products would change the amount of credits earned. The results show that the distribution of wood products produced has the greatest in?uence on the number of credits received, that it is important to include land?ll storage in the models, and that alternative models for the change in wood product stock may improve the accuracy of the calculations.