Cooling aerosols and changes in albedo counteract warming from CO and black carbon from forest bioenergy in Norway.

Climate impacts of forest bioenergy result from a multitude of warming and cooling effects and vary by location and technology. While past bioenergy studies have analysed a limited number of climate-altering pollutants and activities, no studies have jointly addressed supply chain greenhouse gas emissions, biogenic CO fluxes, aerosols and albedo changes at high spatial and process detail. Here, we present a national-level climate impact analysis of stationary bioenergy systems in Norway based on wood-burning stoves and wood biomass-based district heating.

Bioenergy from forestry and changes in atmospheric CO2: reconciling single stand and landscape level approaches.

Analyses of global warming impacts from forest bioenergy systems are usually conducted either at a single stand level or at a landscape level, yielding findings that are sometimes interpreted as contrasting. In this paper, we investigate and reconcile the scales at which environmental impact analyses of forest bioenergy systems are undertaken. Focusing on the changes caused in atmospheric CO2 concentration of forest bioenergy systems characterized by different initial states of the forest, we show the features of the analyses at different scales and depict the connections between them.