Assessing Forestry Strategy for Addressing Climate Change and Its Challenges Toward Carbon Neutrality in China

Background: China’s terrestrial ecosystem carbon sink, in which forests contribute the most, offsets 7%–15% of national anthropogenic emissions by approximately 80%. China’s forestry strategy for addressing climate change has been receiving much attention concerning its role in climate change mitigation and in helping to achieve carbon neutrality. Methods: China’s forestry strategy for addressing climate change was assessed using qualitative data from document analysis and literature review; Challenges toward carbon neutrality were derived from in-depth interviews. Results: A self-developed extension of relevant frameworks were employed to assess China’s forestry strategy for addressing climate change in four aspects: increasing carbon sink, preventing carbon emission, storing harvested wood product carbon, and substituting forestry bioenergy carbon. Challenges and recommendations were presented from a multidimensional perspective using interviews with government officials, experts, and professors. Conclusions: Environmentally, China need to emphasize science-based and large-scale greening, improve forest quality by precise tending, establish a more climate-resilient and adaptive forest ecosystem, and curb the spread of exotic forest pests through early warning in forestry strategy formulation to maintain and improve the forest carbon sinks and maximize their contribution to carbon neutrality. Socioeconomically, promoting forestry carbon education and knowledge, enhancing publicity and social awareness of wood and bamboo products via multiple platforms, and balancing the timber supply and demand flexibly without sacrificing the forestry economy’s growth are essential for China. Technically, it is vital to improve the quality and stability of wood and bamboo products and extend their service life and carbon storage time, make a breakthrough in forest biomass thermochemical conversion and multi-coupling technology, optimize forest carbon measurement and monitoring system, and carry out research on the critical technology of forest sink enhancement.