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The entry into force of the new Italian national forest law was followed by the recent approval of the new European regulation 2018/841 on the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from land use, land use change and forest (the so called LULUCF sector) into the 2030 climate and energy reduction targets. While the national forest law has been extensively debated, the EU regulation has not received, at least in Italy, a due attention by the forest sector. Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the accounting and reporting of GHG for the forestry sector has been strongly debated and constrained by a series of technical issues, such as the quantification of the actual contribution of anthropogenic activities to GHG removals. The new LULUCF regulation seeks to overcome these limits by proposing a novel approach for accounting GHG emissions and removals in the forestry sector for the period 2020-2030. Moreover, emissions in the forest sector become more comparable to those in other sectors. The most innovative aspects refer to the so-called Forest Reference Level (FRL), and to the inclusion of accounting procedures also for Harvested Wood Products. The FRL is an estimate of the expected GHG emissions and removals in managed forest lands, against which the future GHG emissions and removals will be calculated. Despite originally based on policy assumptions (e.g., expected harvest), the new FRL is based on estimating the theoretical development of forests resulting from the continuation of the management practices as observed in the reference period 2000-2009. Thus, the FRL incorporates the age-structure dynamics of forest stands, and allows for increasing removals in aging forests. In this way, any impact of changes in forest management on GHG emissions will be considered, as in other sectors. Considering that Member States have the responsibility to account for GHG emissions and removals for the LULUCF sector, the implementation of the new LULUCF regulation, and the inherent calculation of the FRL represent both a challenge (for defining past and future management practices and harvest) and an opportunity (for enhancing the forestry-wood and energy chain) for the forestry sector in Italy.

A comprehensive assessment of European forest-based biomass harvest potentials, their future utilization and implications on international wood product markets and forest carbon dynamics requires the capability to model forest resource development as well as global markets for wood-based commodities with sufficient geographical and product detail and, most importantly, their interactions. To this aim, we apply a model framework fully integrating a European forest resource model and a global economic forest sector model. In a business-as-usual (BaU) scenario, European Union harvests increase seven percent by 2030 compared to past levels (485 million m3 on 2000-2012 average and 517 million m3 in 2030). The subsequent annual carbon stock change is a ten percent reduction by 2030 compared to 2000-2012 average (equal to 119.3 Tg C yr-1), corresponding to decreasing carbon-dioxide removal by the European forests. A second, high mobilization scenario (HM), characterized by the full utilization of the potential wood supply and a doubling of EU wood pellets consumption, was designed to explore potential impacts on forest carbon dynamics and international wood product markets under intensive exploitation of biomass resources. In the HM scenario, harvest increases by 55% (754 million m3 in 2030) compared to the BaU scenario. Fuelwood accounts for this increase in harvest levels as overall competition effects from increased wood pellets consumption outweighs synergies for material uses of wood, resulting in slightly reduced harvests of industrial roundwood. As expected, this increasing harvest level would significantly impair carbon-dioxide forest sequestration from the atmosphere in the medium term (-83% in 2030, compared to 2000-2012 average).