Including Carbon Accounting in Learning Tools for Sustainable Forest Management

Forests play a central role in climate change mitigation through carbon storage and by substituting more carbon-intensive materials and energy sources with wood-based products. However, forest managers often lack practical guidance on assessing the climate impacts of their daily decisions. This paper provides a scientific basis for including climate effects in forestry choices, using marteloscopes — real-world outdoor learning plots — as tools to illustrate trade-offs between carbon, biodiversity, and economic objectives.

The authors developed a framework to model carbon emissions associated with thinning operations at two Danish marteloscope sites, comparing carbon dynamics under different strategies relative to a no-harvest baseline. Although thinning initially reduces forest carbon stocks, in most scenarios this is offset — and often outweighed — by increases in carbon stored in harvested wood products plus carbon gains from substituting fossil-intensive materials and fuels. The net climate effect depends on forest growth rates, product substitution potentials, and how rapidly harvested wood products decay.

Importantly, the paper emphasizes that marteloscopes not only model carbon balances but serve as educational platforms where forestry professionals, students, and stakeholders can practice evaluating trade-offs between economic, biodiversity, and climate goals at the tree and stand level.