Wildfire burns 11,000 acres of carbon-offset forest

Saw this article linked in today’s TreeFrog daily new email:

Northern California Wildfire Burns in Carbon Offset Project

Excerpt:

A Northern California wildfire is burning in a vast swath of land where trees are protected in exchange for so-called carbon credits.

The Shelly Fire, which ignited July 3 in Siskiyou County, has spread across thousands of acres of land owned by the Portland-based Ecotrust Forest Management, or EFM. The investment firm protects the trees on its land, rather than clear-cut logging them as some neighboring landowners do. Storing carbon on the land in the form of trees allows the company to sell carbon credits intended to offset the harmful climate effects of other activities.

Carbon credits are often sold to companies or individuals who want to make up for other polluting activities. Some companies bill themselves as carbon-neutral because they say the carbon offsets they buy into account for their pollution.

The Shelly Fire has burned across about 11,000 acres of EFM’s 18,000-acre carbon storage project in Siskiyou County. This raises questions about the viability of carbon storage projects in areas prone to high-severity fire.

Much of EFM’s carbon offset plot hadn’t burned for 70 years or more before the Shelly Fire, and as a result was covered with extremely overstocked, unhealthy forests — conditions that can result in high-severity fire that decimates trees.

My comment: This one case does not mean that all carbon offset projects are unlikely to have important benefits. However, it does offer an arguement to those who suggest that we ought to create “strategic forest reserves” to store C02 and protect biodiversity, such as in this paper, which we discussed here and elsewhere.