How much can the forest-based sector help mitigate climate change?
Jean-Luc Peyron, Guy Fradin et Guilhem Bourrié, members of the French Academy of Agriculture
This is the question, slightly reworded, that will be debated during the public session of the French Academy of Agriculture organized on the afternoon of December 10, 2025, under the auspices of the Working Group on Forests and their Long-Term Multifunctionality.
This working group was set up to inform public policy and facilitate relations between science, management, and society by taking a systemic and transitional approach to forest management in its ecological, economic, social, and preventive dimensions. To this end, it has addressed several issues, including this one, which aims to place the role of the forest-based sector in the mitigation of climate change within an overall vision.
For this purpose, we need to move beyond a vision that considers forest carbon sinks in a overall and purely quantitative way, without distinguishing between their various components and their specific logic in the context of sustainable forest management. A closer look reveals that the forest-based sector's contributions to climate change mitigation are varied and deserve to be assessed separately: reduction of land clearing, afforestation, strengthening of soil organic matter, productivity and variation in stocks of living biomass, dead biomass, wood products, substitution of wood for products that use fossil resources, risk prevention. Furthermore, these represent only a fraction of the efforts that need to be made, the level of which must be determined according to the nature of each and the constraints that apply to them. Among the latter is the obligation of sustainable management, which involves preventing risks in general and putting into perspective the importance of climate change mitigation in forestry relative to other ecological, economic, and social issues that are equally important and specific to forests.
This session on forests and the carbon cycle can be understood as complementary to the session held on January 29, 2025, which presented ”new perspectives on the relationship between forests and water”. The novelty lies in analyzing the influence of forest cover on its environment, meteorology, and climate rather than the opposite.
To find out more about the program: here
To watch the replay video of the January session: here
