Does forest matter regarding Chilean CO₂ international abatement commitments? A multilevel decomposition approach

This paper assesses the role of the forestry sector in the CO₂-eq emissions change in Chile from 1990 to 2013. Due to its relevance, this sector is considered as a proxy LULUCF activities. A second objective of this paper is to explore whether the forestry sector has always contributed to a decoupling process between CO₂-eq emissions and economic growth. To address the first objective, the LMDI method has been used. For the second objective, the decoupling status between CO₂-eq emissions comes from the Tapio index, which was used for the first step. For the second step, a second level of decomposition was carried out. Major findings from the LMDI and second-level decomposition analysis reveal that Chile's forestry sector clearly acted as a sink but failed to outweigh the role played by all other sectors taken into consideration. The results show that Chile has also failed to reach decoupling between economic growth and CO₂-eq emissions. Efforts made in the forestry sector to reduce CO₂ emissions were interesting but not strong enough to meet decoupling objectives. It is recommended that native forest management be reinforced and strengthened, mainly by reforestation with oak, raulí and coigüe varieties.