On the validity of natural regeneration in determination of land-use baseline

To the editors:

We thank Matthew Brander (Brander 2015) for his response to our paper on the necessity of a land-use baseline in attributional LCA (Soimakallio et al. 2015). Brander supports our key argument that a land-use baseline is necessary in attributional LCA (ALCA). However, Brander raises concerns about the appropriateness of ALCA to support decision-making and questions our claim that natural regeneration is the appropriate land-use baseline for ALCA. Brander presents three arguments against natural regeneration: (1) natural regeneration is not natural as it can occur only after human-induced disturbance, (2) natural regeneration overestimates the forgone carbon sequestration if summed over time, and (3) the use of the natural regeneration baseline to quantify the effect of land occupation aligns with consequential, not attributional, LCA.