Study On Progress Of Harvested Wood Products In International Negotiation Of Climate Change And Its Carbon Accounting Methodology

In light of the great potential of Harvested Wood Products (HWPs) in mitigating climatechange, the continual evolution of relative climate change negotiation, and the development ofthe methodology for carbon accounting and monitoring specific for national greenhouseinventory, it is of both theoretical significance and practical urgency to evaluate carbonaccounting approaches/methods for HWPsparticularly focusing on the carbon transferembodied in the fast increasing international trade volume of wood products. More importantly,at the national level, the four approaches bring significantly different results implying differentpolitical, social-economic and environmental implications. This study reviewed the progress ofrelative international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on ClimateChange (UNFCCC) focusing on the latest development after the Durban COP17in2011whichmandatorily included HWPs in carbon accounting in the National Greenhouse Inventoryfollowed with a summary of the most concerned and difficulty on this topic. In addition, theselected Parties’ treatment of HWPS in their submitted Forest Management Reference Level(FMRL) is analyzed. An interdisciplinary study approach is firstly applied in this research tointroduce the general carbon accounting principles when preparing the National GreenhouseInventories, the resources allocation under climate change, the responsibility bearing andinternational equity into this topic. Furthermore, from the perspectives of accountingmethodology, environmental policy, economics, international politics decision-making, andpolitical philosophy, a number of carbon accounting or responsibility principles wererespectively proposed including principles of technological feasibility and economic viability,accuracy, relevance to the reporting needs of the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol (KP);advancing sustainable development, relevance to the national policy; scientific attribution, fairallocation; production-based, consumer-based, and income-based responsibility; and equalityfrom viewpoints of Egalitarianism, Prioritarianism, and Sufficientarianism. In addition, theevaluation system was developed composing five criteria being feasibility of approach,accuracy of approach, the relevance to the reporting needs of the UNFCCC and the KP, relevance to national policies, and fairness/equality. Then, the four approaches for estimatingcarbon storage in HWPs, namely, the IPCC default approach, the stock-change approach, theproduction approach, and the atmospheric-flow approach and the methods within them wereevaluated using the five criteria. It turns out that:1)IPCC default approach is the simplest andproduction approach is the most complicated and least feasible using the feasibility criteria;2)the accuracy of IPCC default approach is the worst and stock-change approach is the mostaccurate followed by atmospheric-flow approach and production approach using the accuracycriteria;3) stock-change approach and production approach are in accordance with theaccounting principles in Land use, land use change and forestry(LULUCF), whileatmospheric-flow approach is in line with the Energy section of the IPCC guidelines using thecriteriaof the relevance to the reporting needs of the UNFCCC and the KP;4)atmospheric-flow approach may provide useful information to support the national planningand tracking effects of national policies while stock-change approach and production approachmay not and all have their specific merits and demerits to advance the sustainableforestmanagement using the criteria of relevance to the national policy; and5)fairness/equalityfrom the perspective of international political decision-making and politicalphilosophyperspective are not achieved, while all approaches may lead to unbalancedallocation of interests of the importers and exporters from the perspective of economies. Lastly,a couple of suggestions were proposed considering the actual conditions of China and itsforestry and forest including:1) continually tracking the progress of relative internationalnegotiation, keeping discrete and considering both its direct and indirect influences, balancingshort-term and long-term interests, and accelerating relative researches;2) considering theallocation effects of HWPs carbon accounting and sharing ofburden bearing when improvingthe extant accounting approach or developing a novel one.