Increasing Carbon Sequestration, Land-Use Efficiency, and Building Decarbonization with Short Rotation Eucalyptus

Global construction activity remains the least responsive large economic sector to the exigencies of global climate change. The focus has centered on operating emissions of buildings, while upfront embodied emissions in building materials remain unabated. Softwood timber, a commonly used building material, can remove and store atmospheric carbon in buildings for decades. However, the upfront climate benefits of using softwoods in building frames are limited due to the multi-decadal growth and harvest cycles of forest plantations. The objective of this study was to demonstrate that fast-growing Eucalyptus is a superior carbon sequestration feedstock for building materials compared to slow-growing softwoods. We quantified the relative carbon benefits of Eucalyptus to a group of commonly used North American softwoods in an all-carbon-pools, risk-adjusted model that compares the net present value of carbon flows over a 100-year period. Using a novel carbon benefit multiple metric, the analysis shows that short-rotation, high-yield Eucalyptus plantations are 2.7× to 4.6× better at sequestering atmospheric carbon than softwoods, depending on the various risk perception scenarios. The results indicate that building decarbonization can be enhanced by using fast-growing and high-yielding Eucalyptus species plantations.