Swedish daily: Why is forest land in Sweden three times as good a carbon sink as that in Finland?
Finns are worried about possibly having to pay thousands of millions of euros because of the poor performance of forest carbon sinks. The Swedish daily Aftonbladet wonders at Swedish reports that show similar forests in Sweden doing well as carbon sinks.
The Swedish daily Aftonbladet analyses why Swedish forest land is three times as good in terms of carbon binding as that in Finland, despite the similarity of forests in the two countries.
The figures reported by Sweden to the United Nations show that forest land in Sweden binds three times as much carbon as those reported by its neighbour Finland.
It does look a bit odd to have such big differences between the two countries, when their forests are the same in many ways.
”It does look a bit odd to have such big differences between the two countries, when their forests are the same in many ways,”says Professor Bengt-Gunnar Jonsson from the Mid-Sweden University to the daily.
Other researchers interviewed by the Aftonbladet also fail to see clearly why the Swedish soil binds so much more carbon compared to Finland. In an international comparison the forests and soil that bind carbon exceptionally well are found in Sweden and France.
According to the Aftonbladet, in 2023 harvesting per hectare on productive forest land in Sweden exceeded that in Finland. Even so, it was only in Finland that the harvesting volume was visible as a reduction of forest carbon sinks.
In Finland it is feared that taxpayers will have to foot a bill of thousands of millions of euros if carbon sinks must be nought from other EU countries.
According to the Aftonbladet, the difference between Sweden and Finland can be explained by the use of different measuring methods.
”Sweden has many more measurements and our time series stretch much farther back. Still, both methods are approved by the IPCC,”, says Erik Karltun from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
The Aftonbladet also reports that in Sweden, both AI and machine learning are used in making the calculations.
Forest carbon sinks became a topic of lively debate in Finland, as the Metsälehti magazine wrote that Swedish forests were reported to have bound tens of millions of tonnes of carbon last year.
The calculations in Finland were made by Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). According to Luke, while this was happening in Sweden, Finnish forests turned into an emission source of 1.12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
This, it was said, eroded Finland’s chances of meeting its carbon neutrality targets. As a result, both the climate panel and ENGOs demanded that harvesting must be significantly reduced.
The researchers interviewed by the Aftonbladet expressed the hope that the reasons behind the substantial difference between the results from neighbouring countries would be gone into in detail in the future.