Forest & Wood Carbon Data Platform

This project will create a single U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-sponsored platform with multiple user-friendly tools providing transparent, high-integrity forest and wood product carbon data throughout the value chain. 

The platform will include six measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) tools that align with a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) objective to serve as the primary source of information on carbon and carbon flows across U.S. forest lands, harvested wood products, and end-use life cycle assessment. 

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis have specifically called out the need to enhance Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MMRV) across all sectors to meet public and private climate goals. Currently, forest and wood product data exist in disparate sources.To meet MMRV needs for a variety of end-users, connections and improvements are necessary to produce standardized data and approaches for quantifying forest-sector greenhouse gas flux for entities across the value chain using the most current regional and national parameters. 

This platform will:

• Provide high-quality carbon data on forests and wood products, enabling consistent holistic reporting at three starting points: the landowner, manufacturer, and end-user;
• Combine Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA) data and other non-proprietary sources of forest sector inventory data with tools, technologies and approaches to enable forest owners to determine the forest carbon stock impacts of forest management regimes for various forest types or species compositions;
• Use published manufacturing environmental product declarations (EPDs), life cycle assessments (LCAs), and USDA entity level guidance to report the embodied (emissions associated with materials or construction processes) carbon in wood products, calculate the embedded (stored) carbon in manufactured products, and estimate the carbon displacement of wood products using substitution factors.

The first phases of funding for this project came from the Softwood Lumber Board and USFS State, Private, and Tribal Forestry programs.

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