Estimating wooden kitchen furniture’s contribution to climate change mitigation

The climate change impacts of using harvested wood products (HWPs) have attracted attention in recent years from Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period to the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015 (FAO 2016). This segment includes wood-based products, which in comparison to competing materials, have a low global warming potential (GWP). Studies have been conducted since the early 1990s on this aspect and despite this, studies analysing the benefits of the furniture sub-sector are rare. This paper estimates the climate change mitigation potential associated with the use of wood in kitchen cabinet, based on an evaluation of its storage and substitution benefits in selected countries in Western Europe. Results indicate that this wood furniture segment could poten- tially store an average of about 15 million t C annually and avoid the additional production of about 7 million t CO2. The results presented constitute a benchmark analysis that may be useful for integrating the wooden furniture sub-sector in climate change mitigation strategies.