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EU environmental law increasingly adopts an impact-based regulatory strategy that places biophysical sciences in a significant role not only in designing regulation but also in interpreting and implementing the law. While crucial for the effectiveness of environmental law, such a regulatory strategy creates challenges for the legitimacy of EU environmental law. This article traces the shift from a behaviour-based to impact-based regulation in this context and analyses the latter in light of Lon L. Fuller's eight classic criteria for the rule of law to expose the legitimacy challenges. Focusing on the EU Water Framework Directive and the Land-use Change and Forestry Regulation, this study shows that EU environmental law suffers from serious shortcomings in securing legal legitimacy and concludes by highlighting how this may be improved going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fossil‐based emissions can be avoided by using wood in place of non‐renewable raw materials as energy and materials. However, wood harvest influences forest carbon stocks. Increased harvest may reduce the overall climate benefit of wood use significantly, but is widely overlooked. We reviewed selected simulation studies and compared differences in forest carbon and amount of wood harvested between harvest scenarios of different intensities for three different time perspectives: short‐ (1–30 years), mid‐ (31–70 years), and long‐term (71–100 years). Out of more than 450 reviewed studies 45 provided adequate data. Our results show that increased harvest reduces carbon stocks over 100 years in temperate and boreal forests by about 1.6 (stdev 0.9) tC per tC harvested (referred to as carbon balance indicator (CBI)). CBI proved to be robust when outliers explicitly influenced by factors other than changes in the harvest rate, such as fertilization or increase in forest area, were removed. The carbon impacts tend to be greatest in the mid‐term, but no significant difference in was found for average values between short and long time‐horizons. CBI can be interpreted as carbon opportunity costs of wood harvest in forests. Our results indicate that even after 100 years, CBI is significant compared to the typical GHG credits expected in the technosphere by avoiding fossil emissions in substitution and increasing carbon stocks in harvested wood products. Our estimates provide typical values that can directly be included in GHG balances of products or assessments of mitigation policies and measures related to wood use. However, more systematic scenarios with transparent information on influencing factors for forest carbon stocks are required to provide better constrained estimates for specific forest types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Replacing non-renewable materials and energy with wood offers a potential strategy to mitigate climate change if the net emissions of ecosystem and technosystem are reduced in a considered time period. Displacement factors (DFs) describe an emission reduction for a wood-based product or fuel which is used in place of a non-wood alternative. The aims of this review were to map and assess DFs from scientific literature and to provide findings on how to harmonise practices behind them and to support coherent application. Results: Most of the reviewed DFs were positive, implying decreasing fossil GHG emissions in the technosystem. The vast majority of the reviewed DFs describe avoided fossil emissions either both in processing and use of wood or only in the latter when wood processing emissions were considered separately. Some of the reviewed DFs included emissions avoided in post-use of harvested wood products (HWPs). Changes in forest and product carbon stocks were not included in DFs except in a few single cases. However, in most of the reviewed studies they were considered separately in a consistent way along with DFs. DFs for wood energy, construction and material substitution were widely available, whereas DFs for packaging products, chemicals and textiles were scarce. More than half of DFs were calculated by the authors of the reviewed articles while the rest of them were adopted from other articles. Conclusions: Most of the reviewed DFs describe the avoided fossil GHG emissions. These DFs may provide insights on the wood-based products with a potential to replace emissions intensive alternatives but they do not reveal the actual climate change mitigation effects of wood use. The way DFs should be applied and interpreted depends on what has been included in them. If the aim of DFs is to describe the overall climate effects of wood use, DFs should include all the relevant GHG flows, including changes in forest and HWP carbon stock and post-use of HWPs, however, based on this literature review this is not a common practice. DFs including only fossil emissions should be applied together with a coherent assessment of changes in forest and HWP carbon stocks, as was the case in most of the reviewed studies. To increase robustness and transparency and to decrease misuse, we recommend that system boundaries and other assumptions behind DFs should be clearly documented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vauhkonen (2023) raised concerns regarding the applicability of the carbon balance indicator (CBI) applied in our paper (Soimakallio et al. 2022) to characterize the results in various contexts, the way the scenario pairs were compared, and the way the results were filtered. Here we respond to each of the above‐mentioned concerns Vauhkonen raised and finally to the conclusions that he drew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urgent need to mitigate climate change invokes both opportunities and challenges for forest biomass utilization. Fossil fuels can be substituted by using wood products in place of alternative materials and energy, but wood harvesting reduces forest carbon sink and processing of wood products requires material and energy inputs. We assessed the extended life cycle carbon emissions considering substitution impacts for various wood utilization scenarios over 100 years from 2010 onward for Finland. The scenarios were based on various but constant wood utilization structures reflecting current and anticipated mix of wood utilization activities. We applied stochastic simulation to deal with the uncertainty in a number of input variables required. According to our analysis, the wood utilization decrease net carbon emissions with a probability lower than 40% for each of the studied scenarios. Furthermore, large emission reductions were exceptionally unlikely. The uncertainty of the results were influenced clearly the most by the reduction in the forest carbon sink. There is a significant trade-off between avoiding emissions through fossil fuel substitution and reduction in forest carbon sink due to wood harvesting. This creates a major challenge for forest management practices and wood utilization activities in responding to ambitious climate change mitigation targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to clarify the application of a land-use baseline in attributional life cycle assessment (ALCA) for product systems involving land use, through consideration of the fundamental purpose of ALCA. Currently, there is no clear view in the literature whether a baseline should be used when accounting for environmentally relevant physical flows related to land use. Methods: An extensive search of literature was carried out using the key terms 'attributional life cycle assessment' and 'attributional LCA' in the Google Scholar web search engine. Approximately 700 publications were reviewed and summarised according to their type and scope, relevance of land use, key statements and references given for ALCA, and arguments for and against using a baseline in ALCA. Based on the literature review and supplementary literature references, a critical discussion on the use of a baseline and determination of the most appropriate land-use baseline in ALCA is provided. Results and discussion: A few studies clearly argued that only absolute (observable) flows without a baseline are to be inventoried in ALCA, while the majority of the studies did not make any clear statement for or against. On the other hand, a land-use baseline was explicitly applied or proposed in a minority of the studies only, despite the fact that we classified land use as highly relevant for the majority of the studies reviewed. Furthermore, the LCA guidelines reviewed give contradictory recommendations. The most cited studies for the definition of ALCA provide general rules for selecting processes based on observable flows but do not argue that observable flows necessarily describe the environmentally relevant physical flows. Conclusions: We conclude that a baseline is required to separate the studied parts of the technosphere from natural processes and to describe the impact of land use on ecosystem quality, such as carbon sequestration and biodiversity. The most coherent baseline for human-induced land-use in ALCA is natural regeneration. As the natural-regeneration baseline has typically been excluded, may vary bio-geographically and temporally, and is subject to uncertainties, case studies applying it should be performed so that implications can be studied and evaluated. This is particularly important for agricultural and forestry systems, such as food, feed, fibre, timber and biofuels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The European Union (EU) has set a binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction target for transportation biofuels and other bioliquids. In this study, the GHG emissions of various biofuel chains considered as relevant in large-scale production in Finland were calculated in accordance with the EU sustainability criteria. Special attention was paid to uncertainties and the sensitivities of certain parameters. According to the results, it is impossible in many cases to unambiguously conclude whether or not a biofuel chain passes the emission-saving limit provided by the EU. This may reduce the willingness to invest in biofuel production. Major sources of uncertainties and sensitivities are nitrous oxide emissions from soil and nitrogen fertilisation, emissions of process heat production and soil carbon stock changes in biomass production. Several propositions are made in order to reduce the uncertainty of the results and to make the EU sustainability criteria for biofuels more harmonised and accurate. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

When regulating GHG emissions at the country or product level, it is critical to determine the GHG emissions from electricity consumption. In this study, we calculated production-based and consumption-based CO2 emission intensities of electricity for the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries during 1990–2008. We examined the impact of annual development, allocation procedure in combined heat and power production, and electricity trade on CO2 emissions. The studied factors significantly, yet highly variably, influenced the results for many countries. The consumption-based CO2 emission intensity of electricity differed significantly from the production-based intensity for some European OECD countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, and Austria. As the use of the production-based method in assessing, verifying, and monitoring the GHG performance of specific products can be highly misleading, the use of consumption-based methods are preferable. The absolute value of CO2 emissions embodied in electricity net imports accounted for more than 5% of the overall national CO2 emissions in at least some of the years studied for 13 European countries. The electricity trade and the related GHG emission leakage may increase in the future if effective emission reduction and regulation measures are not more widely implemented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]