A new publication reviewed 32 guidelines in 43 areas to give a summary of current residue harvesting guidelines.
Forest biomass harvesting guidelines help ensure the ecological sustainability of forest residue harvesting for bioenergy and bioproducts. Guidelines, typically voluntary, provide a means to achieve outcomes often required by legislation, and must address needs related to local or regional context, jurisdictional compatibility with regulations, issues of temporal and spatial scale, and incorporation of appropriate scientific information.
Given this complexity, comprehensive reviews of existing guidelines can aid in development of new guidelines or revision of existing ones. This publication reviewed 32 guidelines covering 43 jurisdictions in the USA, Canada, Europe and East Asia to expand upon information evaluated and recommendations provided in previous guideline reviews, and compiled a searchable spreadsheet of direct quotations from documents as a foundation for the review.
Guidelines were considered in the context of sustainable forest management (SFM), focusing on guideline scope and objectives, environmental sustainability concerns (soils, site productivity, biodiversity, water and carbon) and social concerns (visual aesthetics, recreation, and preservation of cultural, historical and archaeological sites). The publication discusses the role of guidelines within the context of other governance mechanisms such as SFM policies, trade regulations and non-state market-driven (NSMD) standards, including certification systems. The review provides a comprehensive resource for those developing guidelines or defining sustainability standards for market access or compliance with public regulations, and/or concerned about the sustainability of forest biomass harvesting. The publication recommends that those developing or updating guidelines consider:
- The importance of well-defined and understood terminology, consistent where possible with guidelines in other jurisdictions or regions.
- Guidance based on locally relevant research, and periodically updated to incorporate current knowledge and operational experience.
- The use of indicators of sensitive soils, sites, and stands which are relevant to ecological processes and can be applied operationally.
- The incorporation of climate impacts, long-term soil carbon storage, and general carbon balance considerations when defining sustainable forest biomass availability.
Successful implementation of guidelines depends both on the relevance of the information and on the process used to develop and communicate it; hence, appropriate stakeholders should be involved early in guideline development. The publication is titled “Sustainable forest biomass: a review of current residue harvesting guidelines”. It was published in the Energy, Sustainability and Society journal (11, 2021). The authors can be viewed by following the source link. Source