Growing stock and carbon sequestration in
wood and soil
|Carbon stock on forest biomass (abouve ground and below
ground) in million metric tones.
Growing stock is one of the basic figures of any forest inventory,
and is useful for various purposes. The volume of growing
stock indicates especially the opportunities available for the
use of wood and harvesting forming also the basic input figure
for several forestry planning calculations. The growing stock is
further closely related to the above ground woody biomass in
forests, and provides the data basis for calculating carbon sequestration
and carbon budgets.
Growing stock in European countries
The most abundant growing stocks in Europe are in Germany,
Sweden, France, Poland and Finland. Although Finland has an
extensive forest area, the volume of wood per hectare is about
the half of the volume of wood per hectare in Germany, Switzerland
or Slovak Republic. This is the due to the different climatic
and soil conditions and partly due to the different tree species.
The trees such as spruce (Picea abies) are in Germany 10–15
meters higher and 10–20 cm thicker than in Finland.
The total growing stock in Europe is 32,690 million m3, and the
increase of the volume has been 1,2% or 356 million m3/year
during the last 20 years. In Finland the corresponding figures
are 2 206 million m3 and 1,0% or 22 million m3/year.
Europe’s and Finland’s forests are major carbon sinks, as they
absorb large amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Carbon stock
of forest biomass (above and below ground) in EU 27 is 9,900
million metric tons of carbon. In EU-27 the annual sequestration of CO2 in forest biomass is 430 million tons, which corresponds
to 9% of the greenhouse gas emissions of these EU-27
countries. In Finland forests sequestered in average 35 million
tonnes of CO2 per year during the last 10 years, which is equivalent
to about 50% of the carbon dioxide emissions of Finnish
Growing stock volume per hectare (left) and volume (right) on forest, 2010.