MANAGING FORESTS CAN
DELIVER SUSTAINABLE CLIMATE BENEFITS
By Sally Collins and Mark Nechodom,
Ph.D.
Climate
change is stressing our forests and forcing us to respond. One
way or another.
Most
regional climate models predict warmer temperatures and drier weather in
western American forests over the next century. Those same models show
increasingly severe wildfire and widespread insect infestations, and
substantially reduced capacity to store carbon or water.
Forests
across California and the West have already begun to adjust to a warming
climate. Ponderosa pine and black oak,
for example, now thrive a thousand feet upslope from
where they used to.
Yet
even as our forests respond to a changing climate there are economic values
that remain untapped in managing forests for greater resilience.
Managing forest values
Forests
can sequester, or remove from the atmosphere and store, tremendous amounts of
carbon. They breathe in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and through
photosynthesis release oxygen to the air and store carbon in wood fiber. The
more carbon we sequester in forests, the less carbon we leave in the atmosphere.
Forests
temporarily store and filter water, lowering the cost of delivering clean
drinking water.
Without
diligent management, forests can only do so much. When forests are overstocked with
accumulated fuel loads, they are prone to severe wildfires, which often destroy
carbon, water and biodiversity values. The full suite of ecosystem benefits
comes from managing forests to reduce the catastrophic effects of wildfires and
to create resilient forest ecosystems. Managing forests for ecosystem services
can help sequester more carbon, protect communities and water quality, enhance
biodiversity, power homes, clear the air and improve forest health.
That
is why we must encourage investment in our forests and the infrastructure to
sustain them.
California,
Idaho, Colorado and Arizona all have experienced record-breaking wildfire seasons
over the last decade. In California during the 2007 and 2008 fire seasons, the
acres burned by severe wildfire increased threefold over the previous five-year
average. Whereas low-intensity fire can clear the forest floor and regenerate
forests, high-intensity blazes can degrade soils and destroy wildlife habitat.
Wildfire
is also a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Millions of tons of carbon
go up in smoke every year. California wildfires in 2008 produced emissions
equivalent to 11,880,000 passenger cars being on the road for a year.
Fire
suppression and land management policies have left a legacy of forests
overgrown with trees and choked with ladder fuels that can turn low-level
ground fires into full-blown crown fires in minutes. Stressed by drought and
fierce competition for water and nutrients, millions of California’s forested
acres stand like tinderboxes ready to erupt.
Reducing
fuel loads can lessen wildfire severity, protect communities and watersheds,
and pay huge climate-change dividends too. Not only does reducing fuel loads
cut emissions from wildfire, the waste materials can help offset emissions
created by burning fossil-fuels to produce energy. Clean energy generated from
biomass collected during fuel-reduction projects can replace energy produced
from coal or natural gas.
Funding needed
Such
an effort at the landscape level, however, presents considerable economic and
logistical challenges. Historically, taxpayer dollars have never been
sufficient to treat all the lands that need thinning. And the private
infrastructure to manage public and private forests has been in decline for
years. Even if we were to suddenly agree to manage our forests for multiple
ecosystem services, we would lack the infrastructure and human resources to do
so in a timely fashion.
Managing
forest ecosystems in light of climate change and the need to secure reliable
sources of clean water may be the first step in creating investment incentives
that lead to sustaining resilient forests. Markets for ecosystem services could well provide the means to pay for some of the work
that needs to be done in our forests by paying landowners for the values
forests can provide.
There is clear social value in reducing wildfire severity and carbon
emissions while conserving wildlife habitat, but currently there is virtually no
revenue associated with those climate or biodiversity benefits. There is social
value in lowering the cost of providing clean drinking water but currently no
financial incentive to manage forest resources to do so. We need to make the
connections between our social values and our pocketbooks. Without investment,
and without revenues to landowners and providers of environmental benefits, the
costs to society will continue to outweigh the benefits.
Infrastructure investment is critical to leveraging working forests to
address climate change and meet the water, wood and recreation demands of a
growing population. Without a long-term
viable way to pay for it, much-needed thinning will not take place and we will
have missed an opportunity to help ourselves, and our forests, prepare for
climate change. An ecosystems services approach can align revenues and values,
and may form a sustainable foundation for a new legacy of safer, more resilient
forests.
Sally Collins is the director of the office of ecosystem services and
markets at the US Dept. of Agriculture.
She previously served a 28-year career in the USDA Forest Service,
including eight as the associate chief.
Mark Nechodom, Ph.D. is
the deputy director of the office of ecosystem services and markets at US Dept.
of Agriculture, overseeing the development of carbon markets. He has an extensive background in life cycle
assessment and biomass renewable energy systems.