Wood resources assessment beyond Europe

Abstract

Since woody biomass is an important renewable energy source and plays a decisive role in mitigating the effects of climate change the issue of the availability of wood is emerging as a relevant post-Kyoto decision. Accordingly, from a national to a global scale, production of better information on the quantities of wood available has turned out to be of importance for assessing sustainable management decisions in forest policy formulations. Additionally, the majority of these agreements require substantial amounts of harmonised, comparable and accurate information from the parties to assess overall progress, compliance with obligations, as well as to determine the next steps of the agreements. This chapter summarises the diversity of sampling methods, definitions and wood resource assessments (focused on forest available for wood supply, stem quality, change estimation and other wooded land and trees outside forest), for twelve NFIs outside Europe (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Ecuador, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, South Korea and the US) that contributed to this book. Then, the differences and similarities among them and the European countries are discussed. The analyses provide a global overview of the current state of the potential harmonised assessment of wood availability and use.