Year: 2026 | Month: September | Volume: 13 | Issue: 9 | Pages: 494-506
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260947
Forest Climate Mitigation Across Time Horizons: Reconciling Carbon Sequestration, Harvesting, Wood Substitution, and Bioenergy Under Dynamic Accounting
Bambang Trihandoko1, Fitryane Lihawa2, Dewi Wahyuni K Baderan3, Marike Mahmud4
1Doctoral Program in Environmental Science, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia
2,3,4Postgraduate Program, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia
Corresponding Author: Bambang Trihandoko
ABSTRACT
Forests are central to climate mitigation, but their net climate effect depends on how ecosystem sequestration, harvesting, harvested wood products, material substitution, and bioenergy interact through time. This critical integrative review reassesses a supplied forest-sector evidence base with emphasis on temporal trade-offs, accounting boundaries, management intensity, product lifetimes, substitution assumptions, and forest productivity. The literature shows that apparently conflicting conclusions are often conditional rather than irreconcilable. Reduced harvesting commonly strengthens near-term ecosystem carbon retention, whereas production-oriented strategies can generate larger long-run benefits only when additional biomass is produced sustainably, allocated efficiently, and demonstrably displaces carbon-intensive materials or fossil energy. Substitution benefits are highly sensitive to the counterfactual product, market additionality, future decarbonization, and whether foregone forest sequestration is fully counted. Dynamic life-cycle studies further show that the timing of biogenic emissions and removals can change the relative performance of management strategies. We therefore propose a four-ledger framework integrating ecosystem carbon, harvested-product storage, avoided fossil and process emissions, and temporal opportunity costs. Break-even time and the required displacement factor are used as complementary decision metrics. The review concludes that no single harvest rule is climate-optimal across contexts; robust assessment requires explicit baselines, policy-relevant time horizons, full forest-sector accounting, and sensitivity testing.
Keywords: forest climate mitigation; forest carbon sequestration; wood product substitution; bioenergy; displacement factors; dynamic life cycle assessment; temporal trade-offs
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