Evaluating carbon emissions and removals resulting from Russia's trade in harvested wood products

Abstract

Harvested wood products (HWP) are carbon reservoirs that remain underutilized in decarbonization policies due to the superficiality of carbon flux estimates in international trade in forest products. This paper focuses on the emissions and removals associated with Russia's foreign trade in HWP. For the first time, we provide estimates of these carbon fluxes for individual Russian regions for 2016–2020. Our findings indicate that the Siberian and North-Western regions are the primary contributors to carbon emissions from international trade. A comparison of estimates from the stock change approach (SCA), the production approach (PA), and the atmospheric flow approach (AFA) points to the latter as the most suitable for application in Russia given the significant proportion of exports in the sales of roundwood and sawn timber. Furthermore, we supplemented the estimates of carbon stock change from HWP trade using an approximation of rail and maritime trade routes for transporting timber from and to Russia. We found that the transportation emissions induced by overland and maritime HWP trade flows account for about 7 % of the total carbon balance from Russia's HWP trade. The largest volumes of emissions from HWP shipments are generated by the main exporters in North-Western Russia and Siberia, as well as regions that play a major role in freight handling.