Evaluation of forest growth and carbon stock in forestry projects by system dynamics

Abstract

Brazil is one of the largest producers of eucalyptus that is used for manufacturing pulp and paper; this contributes directly to the issue of carbon emissions. Reforestation of eucalyptus appears as a viable alternative for mitigating these carbon emissions, leveraging their high productivity to that of other leading countries in the market, such as Finland and Sweden. This study aims to develop a model for monitoring and evaluating forest growth and quantifying wood stocks and sequestered carbon. System dynamics was used to simulate forest growth. Forest growth was modeled from eight regions with dissimilar edaphoclimatic characteristics, in the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. The model was sensitive enough to the characteristics of the regions, where the difference in forest stocks was 45.1% at the end of 30 years in a harvest cycle of 7 years. It was found that the typical harvest cycle in practice by leading companies did not always yield a higher sequestered CO2 accumulated stock. By shortening the harvest cycle, it was possible to obtain a gain of up to 21.0% in the sequestered CO2 stock.