The LASER (Life-cycle Assessment Synthesized with Ecosystems and Risk) project enhances the assessment of Forest-Natural Climate Solutions (fNCS) by developing a scalable, spatially-explicit method to evaluate their climate, ecosystem, and social impacts. fNCS, such as timber harvesting in Canada, bioenergy in the United States, or pulp and paper production in Brazil, are often considered carbon neutral or negative. A booming $330 billion carbon offset market trades credits generated by these and other climate solutions. However, the carbon neutrality of fNCS is contested due to complexities in forest ecosystems, management practices, and the fate of harvested forest carbon (forest-C).

Studies indicate fNCS can exacerbate climate change by triggering greenhouse gas emissions from soil or rapidly releasing forest-C into the atmosphere. Additionally, fNCS can undermine local livelihoods, fragment habitats, and cause other unintended impacts. Current assessment methods fail to adequately model forest-C, neglect social and ecological sustainability, and lack scalability across diverse locations.

LASER addresses these gaps by integrating forest ecology and industrial ecology for robust carbon accounting, combining advanced carbon analysis with geospatial methods and fieldwork to uncover tradeoffs between climate performance and community impacts. The project builds an online platform to model and display fNCS impacts across biomes and scales, offering a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to better inform companies, regulators, investors, and communities.

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