The art of lowering ambition: How the Swedish wood industry is blowing smoke on the climate benefits of wood products
Governments are facing pressure to deliver on LULUCF targets, and the wood industry is aggressively marketing wood products as a climate solution, while paradoxically calling for the ambition of forest climate targets to be lowered.
However, independent research shows that both claimed and potential carbon benefits of wood in products are routinely exaggerated, and that maintained or planned increases in logging undermine the land sector’s vital role as a carbon sink, and an intact carbon stock.
Even though carbon can be stored temporarily in wood, this far from counteracts the carbon emitted during logging and the decomposition of end-products. It is therefore a challenge to LULUCF targets. To reform forestry, governments must focus on restoration by creating enabling conditions for SMEs to thrive and generate more value from forests with less negative environmental impact.
The Substitution Effect: Industry Claims vs. Scientific Evidence
The wood industry, especially in Sweden, claims that using wood products instead of other carbon-intensive materials (like concrete, fuel or steel) delivers significant climate benefits—a concept known as the “substitution effect.” Swedish companies such as SCA assert that their wood products provide huge carbon benefits.
This is not a coincidence - an industry roundtable in 2019 revealed a coordinated effort to revise and weaken the LULUCF Regulation, “establish a common understanding that sustainable forestry cannot be equated with large carbon stocks”, and promote the substitution effect arguing it supports the “green” transition.
Independent scientific reviews sharply contradict these substitution claims. The JRC notes that:
“The substitution effect of wood is often exaggerated. The climate benefit of using wood in products is typically much less than claimed by industry, especially when accounting for the full carbon cycle and the carbon lost from the forest sink due to harvesting.”
New Swedish research, also confirms that the greatest climate benefit from forests is achieved through reduced logging. In short, troves of sources identify how the term “substitution” is easily manipulated, leading to the following conclusions:
- The ‘substitution effect’ is being used as a smokescreen to justify business as usual: Harvesting is a main driver of the LULUCF sink loss and the carbon pool of wood products has not made up for the loss.
- Quantitative estimates of substitution effects often rely on bad research: The numbers put forward by such papers amount to a marketing exercise, as they are almost never grounded in data about what wood products actually substitute.
- Wood products store carbon only temporarily: Most wood products (paper, energy, packaging, fast-fashion, furniture and pellets) have short lifespans, and much of the carbon returns to the atmosphere within a decade.
In addition to false narratives about the climate benefit, Sweden’s old-growth forests have been cleared six to seven times faster than the Brazilian Amazon forest between 2008 and 2023 (thousands of hectares per year). Old-growth forests are crucial carbon stocks.
What Should Governments Do?
Support industry actors who see economic and environmental opportunities together. Input from foresters at a recent bioeconomy event highlighted how the industry is squeezing small-scale foresters by paying dirt cheap prices for timber:
“Forestry today works for wood processing industries but not for rural communities. We focus on extraction and cost minimisation – which is a problem as humans are the cost we are trying to minimise. In response we must focus on high-end products, not just pulpwood, and look to increase value, not volumes.”
In order to help forest owners by providing options to deliver wood and other products and services that are better for biodiversity, and thus actually deliver real climate benefits, governments must:
- Prioritise the protection and restoration of forests as carbon sinks and stocks through a strong, binding LULUCF target.
- End subsidies and incentives for bioenergy and BECCS in 2040 climate targets.
- Reject exaggerated claims about the substitution effect of wood and biobased products.
- Base policy on independent science, not industry lobbying that seeks to maximise extraction.
- Ensure public forests are used principally for protection and restoration of high carbon stock forests that help to deliver the goals of climate adaptation, LULUCF, the Biodiversity Strategy, Habitats and Birds Directives and the Nature Restoration Law.
- Aim to reduce consumption of forest materials.
- Encourage national forestry sectors to implement ecosystem-based or close-to–nature silvicultural approaches that are higher in biodiversity (and thus more resilient) and produce higher value products over cheap bulk production of pulp for energy-burning and paper.
The best climate action for forests is to protect and restore more forests, and to support rural communities to find more economic value with less end-products. The path to climate neutrality requires increased protection, not continued exploitation of our forests and foresters.
Signatories: Birdlife Europe & Central Asia, BirdLife Sverige, Canopée, ECOS, Fern, Great Lakes and Wetlands Association, Green Liberty, Pracownia, Protect the Forest Sweden
Categories: NGO Statements, LULUCF
