Yield of land: a sustainability issue which is not in LCA
The importance of the yield of land is fully in line with the philosophy of the ecological footprint. This is the notion that the consumption of people is to be supported by the production of land: more consumption leads to less nature. See Fig. 6.3a
For designers, architects and engineers it means that yield is an additional sustainability issue (apart from LCA) in the selection of the type of wood, since every type of wood has its own yield in forestry.
For wood from the boreal areas, the issue is not yet an urgent issue, since land for forestation is still widely available.
However, for wood from tropical plantations, as well a production of agricultural products, yield is an urgent issue: the adjacent nature has a high biodiversity
Figure 6.1a. The yield of forests (management and plantation), as well as the yield of agricultural areas, is of highly importance, since it negatively effects the area which remains available for nature in future. Note that this dynamic aspect is not fully covered in land-use change in LCA
(see Fig 6.3a), so there is a loss of valuable nature by occupying land that could have been preserved as tropical forest.
Note that the issue of yield is not fully covered by the effects of land-use and land-use change in LCA. The reason is that land-use and land-use change are direct effects: it is about the area of land that converts form nature to plantation or agricultural area. This is in contrast to the issue of yield, which is an indirect effect of the adjacent areas of land.
