Assessing carbon balance trade-offs between bioenergy and carbon sequestration of stumps at varying time scales and harvest intensities

Mitigating climate change and securing a supply of energy may be achieved, in part, by substituting fossil fuels with bioenergy from stumps and roots. However, the use of stumps would result in a reduction of the carbon pool and thus, from a greenhouse gas emission perspective, there is a trade-off between using stumps for bioenergy and retaining them in the carbon pool associated with dead organic matter. The objective of this study was to show whether, from a carbon balance perspective and over the short and long-terms, stumps are more important as a source of energy that replaces fossil fuels, or as a carbon sink.