Carlos Avila Gonzalez, San Francisco Chronicle via AP, File A burned hillside where crews are planting seedlings including Giant Sequoia in Mountain Home State Demonstration Forest outside Springville, Calif., on April 26, 2022. Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to quickly regrow have far outpaced the government’s capacity to replant trees.
In the above photo, taken from the op-ed, I found a new idea.. that we need to keep living trees around as much as possible because we can’t scale up artificial regeneration otherwise (depending on assumptions about future fires). I had never heard that, but increasing the possibility of natural regeneration seems like a good idea for a number of reasons, biological and economic. Plus there is much truth to the difficulty of scaling up.
The op-ed goes into some of the mechanics that many of us have known to be true and seem obvious (dead trees (except for serotinous cones) produce no offspring). And shade helps surface temperatures.
Even when summers are hotter and drier after a wildfire than in the past, just having trees around that survived a fire helps new seedlings establish and grow.
Besides providing seeds, surviving trees reduce temperatures on the ground, where it matters most to seedlings. In some cases, temperatures can be 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler (2.2 to 2.8 C) around surviving trees, giving seedlings the edge needed to germinate and survive.
In our study, projections of future forests varied dramatically, depending on how many trees we assumed survived future wildfires.
Of course, in many areas before and after burning we can see that topography and soils (or lack thereof, as Larry pointed out) affects which species grow successfully. And most (all) climate modeling doesn’t take that into account. Nevertheless, they go on to say..
Science supports the use of a number of tools, or forest treatments, that can help decrease the number of trees killed by wildfires.
Controlled burning with forest thinning or cultural burning by local Indigenous groups removes small trees and brush. That leads to fewer trees killed in subsequent fires, especially in forests that historically burned frequently. In high-elevation forests that historically experienced less frequent but more severe wildfires, planting trees after wildfires can help jump-start forest recovery.
Although forest treatments are effective, wildfires burn much more area than can be feasibly treated. Given this, fire scientists suggest letting some wildfires burn when conditions are safe and more likely to leave surviving trees on the landscape.
Expanding the use of wildfires and controlled burning as management tools is challenging, but the evidence suggests it may be one of the most effective and economical ways to reduce the number of trees killed by future wildfires.
There are clear ways to lessen the impacts of global warming and wildfires on seedlings and future forests. But in some areas, even as we work to reverse global warming, the window of opportunity is short. In these areas, forest treatments that modify wildfire or jump-start recovery will be most effective in the next few decades, setting up seedlings to better withstand near-term warming.
Perhaps fire ecologists views – thin when necessary, burn, sometimes plant where you need to; plus some WFU (or let me know what the current term is) are the way to go. Does anyone disagree with this?
When I first heard about the concept of proforestation, it seemed like an East Coast phenomenon. I thought “So what? Some of the usual suspects wrote an op-ed in Nature and various other outletsl their usual ideological beverage with a carbon twist?” Perhaps it’s timed to be part of a media campaign hoping to affect the Mature and Old Growth initiative of Forest Service and BLM.
Since I’ve worked on letters to the Forest Service about MOG, when I ran across a letter on proforestation by a bunch of scientists from The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment I could recognize both excellent writing and a host of useful references. The themes that the authors touch on are also found in MOG. What’s particularly interesting to me about this letter is that Connecticut has no National Forests, and isn’t a dry forest/wildfire area. They don’t see forests go up in smoke, with associated carbon emissions. And they are talking about state and private land. So it’s interesting to see what they have to say.
Proforestation, on which the working group recommendations are based, is a recent political movement that aims to prevent forest management in the United States under the assumption that excluding humans from forests will serve as a climate change mitigation tool [4, 14, 15]. It also omits important aspects of forest carbon science [16]. It appears to be premised on a single opinion article published in an academic journal last year [14]. The reality is that forest carbon science is complex [17]. Excluding silviculture from Connecticut’s forests could result in them sequestering less atmospheric carbon over time, due to future losses from catastrophic disturbances (such as windstorms, invasive species, and fire) and lack of carbon benefits derived from forest products.
We lack a clear scientific answer to major questions related to forest carbon. These include:
• How do forest carbon dynamics change with forest succession, species composition, climate, and site characteristics? Disturbance events make future forest carbon dynamics, and the longevity of carbon stored in today’s forests, unpredictable [16, 18-23]. These events, which release vast amounts of forest carbon, are predicted to increase with climate change [24]. Appropriate and even optimized forest management can mitigate the risk of disturbance and reduce forest carbon lost in those events [25, 26].
• What is the lifecycle of carbon in forest soils and how does this relate to disturbance, climate, species composition, forest succession, and human activity [18, 22, 27-32]?
• Under what circumstances might unmanaged forests store more carbon than managed forests, and how do time and natural disturbances factor in to this comparison?
• How do methane emissions from forests differ between sites, species composition, and age structure [33-35]?
• What are the climate implications of multiple-use forest management which includes harvested forest products, compared to proforestation? Storage of carbon in forests and/or wood products are climate mitigation components, and wood can also serve as a fossil fuel reduction mechanism [1, 16, 36-38]. System level forest carbon accounting is complex and dynamic which highlights a need for comprehensive, and product specific, wood life cycle analyses and comparisons with non-renewable alternatives and market forces [39]. Woody biomass generated in forest management activities can bring additional climate benefits by either storing carbon in forest products [37] and/or replacing fossil-based counterparts [40].
Proforestation does not account for system level carbon dynamics related to forest products and misleads us to conclude that its adoption would be the most carbon positive of all forest policy choices. Given such questions, proforestation is an undemonstrated, unwise approach as a climate solution while active management provides a suite of approaches that can be tailored to find solutions to known and emerging threats to forest carbon storage and health. The proforestation movement misleads us to believe that people are not part of natural forests, a belief based on a dichotomy of nature and culture that has been shown to promote environmental degradation instead of conservation [41]. Indeed, for thousands of years before European colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples stewarded and actively managed Connecticut’s forests, through prescribed fire and harvesting of wood for a variety of uses. This active management by people still influences the forests we see today. The myth of a “pristine” unmanaged forest being the natural state of Connecticut’s forests is just not accurate or necessarily desirable for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, or other ecosystem services. Active forest management has been crucial through time for ensuring that our forests are healthy and resilient while meeting society’s needs.
What the proforestation movement gets right is that poor land management can decimate the biodiversity and ecosystem services of forests. Just as sound management has conserved our contemporary forest after a period of destructive agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, we now need to rely on ongoing management to steward these forests through multiple threats, including more frequent and intense weather events such as droughts and storms, and losses due to invasive pathogens. These increasing threats reflect the fact that Connecticut’s forests are human influenced, they have been for millennia and this is even more true today due to climate and other environmental changes. Keeping forests healthy and growing under conditions of multiplying and intensifying threats will require the ongoing human intervention that management offers. Management allows us to maintain growing forests, and growing forests sequester carbon.
Silviculture enables us to facilitate successional trajectories that will make forests more resilient to ongoing and emerging threats from global change, while supporting rural livelihoods and sustaining biodiversity. The science of silviculture in Connecticut is not about cutting primary forests, planting monocultures, or other such extractive practices which deliver only short-term gain. Outdated caricatures of forestry professionals are detrimental and threaten the resiliency of our state’s forests. Silviculture is about sustaining healthy forestlands, which involves anticipating and responding to disturbances that threaten long-term forest health, through science- and practice-informed strategies.
There are also broader issues at play here relating to sustainable rural economies and environmental justice and responsibility. For example, ‘preservation’ of a wealthy society’s resources leads to greater exploitation of forest resources in places where less regulation and scientific knowledge exist to ensure sustainable management. This concept has been described as the illusion of preservation [42]. We are loath to be drawn into the nuances of these arguments, but suffice to say that meeting energy and wood demands must involve globally-coordinated initiatives with consideration to the differences between biogenic carbon emissions and fossilized carbon emissions [17, 37, 43, 44]. In Connecticut, we have restored our state forestland through management which can continue to maintain – and even enhance – the carbon, other environmental, and rural community benefits of our forestlands. Exporting demands for forest products to regions without our rich scientific and practitioner expertise is damaging to both our state and the planet. Connecticut needs to support the DEEP Forestry Division by providing them with enough resources to fully, and appropriately, steward our State forestlands.
We end by stating that we are ProForests, ProBiodiversity, ProClimate and ProRuralCommunities. In Connecticut, that necessitates being ProManagement.
Attached is the letter with the references and the names of the signatories. My bold on the first sentence.
I couldn’t find a photo of today’s version, at least Bend is near Gilchrist.
This E&E News story is good, but sadly it’s behind a paywall. I’m going to excerpt a few paragraphs.
Moore told E&E News last week he’s not sure how long the timber transport pilot project will last but that his main goal is to keep mills open in places like the Black Hills, where his agency’s own policies to limit timber harvests on the 1.2-million-acre Black Hills National Forest have been blamed for squeezing local mills. The local timber industry and lawmakers who represent the region are watching every move. The Biden administration is funding the program through the 2021 infrastructure law, with an initial goal of moving around 3 million board feet by March. The arrangement is connected to a $50 million forest stewardship partnership with the National Wild Turkey Federation.
If the pilot project succeeds, it might show one way the Forest Service can step up forest thinning in places like California and Oregon. In those states, milling capacity has shrunk but forest managers say thick vegetation and dead trees will invite more and bigger wildfires as climate change worsens.
If the experiment stumbles, Moore may hand the same troubles to his successors without a clear solution, and communities reliant on forest products will continue to face the threat of mill closures as they have in the Black Hills, where Neiman Enterprises — a partner in the project — has said it can’t sustain its mills without a more dependable supply of wood.
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“We’re not saying this is the best solution, but it’s the one we’ve come up with for right now,” Moore said in a brief interview at the National Association of Counties’ winter legislative conference.
“We have to start somewhere,” Moore added. “What’s critical to us is that these mills stay in business, and if we can work collectively across many different landscapes to do that, we should do that.”
Wood products companies and forest policy consultants said the experiment’s success hinges on finding uses for the wood that help make up for the cost of transportation — and on the federal government’s continued willingness to subsidize the effort if it doesn’t pencil out. “I don’t know how the numbers work out unless the feds pay from start to finish,” said Catherine Mater, a wood products engineer in Oregon who frequently works with the Forest Service.
That’s because many of the trees that would be thinned from ailing Western forests would have diameters of less than 10 inches, Mater said, and many mills aren’t equipped for such small material.
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The wood products company most involved in the timber project, Neiman Enterprises, sees opportunity in medium-sized logs it can secure from markets that are already saturated, said Marcus Neiman, a vice president at the family-owned business. The company makes heating pellets at its mill in Spearfish, S.D., near the Black Hills National Forest, using sawdust and wood shavings from ponderosa pine, which grows in the region. Neiman said the pellet business is challenging but that he sees “plenty of opportunity to broaden the reach of biomass markets in the U.S.” as part of a comprehensive approach to forest management.
In an initial “proof of concept” experiment, the company paid to ship logs from Oregon to its mill in Hulett, Wyo., Neiman said. Negotiations on the first timber sale through the program are nearing completion, he said. The company can turn medium-sized logs into boards, as well as exploring other products, he said.
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The National Wild Turkey Federation, a hunting group that seeks to protect wildlife habitat, is supporting the transport pilot through a 20-year stewardship agreement with the Forest Service. The agreement includes a directive from USDA to help move timber from areas that are short on milling capacity — but need forest work — to areas that have a shortage of timber to supply local mills.
The arrangement, with the Burlington Northern railroad as another partner, isn’t necessarily cost effective but addresses the needs to keep mills running and reduce potential wildfire fuel in forests, the NWTF has said (Greenwire, Jan. 6).
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When I finally ran down an economist, he told me that transportation subsidies, for a variety of reasons, are indeed a thing. If you look under USDA transportation subsidies, you will find transit subsidies for workers to get to work, subsidies to offset logistics cost of getting containers to a container yard and the USDA BCAP program(I’m not sure it’s currently funded, but here’s a link to a CRS report on the program..)
Matching payments are intended to provide incentives for collecting underutilized biomass for bioenergy production. This would remove existing biomass where it might not currently be profitable to do so (e.g., crop residue or forest undergrowth)
Bottom line.. USDA and other government agencies subsidize many things for many reasons. We can disagree about whether they “should”, but it’s not unusual.
We’re not economists, but having observed them ..
If we assume that these logs would otherwise be burned in piles, then there’s the social cost of carbon (which I think is a bogus number but many people use) plus smoke effects.
So to figure out what is the best use, we’d have to look at other possible uses and non-uses.
Then we’d have to make assumptions about “what if the same lumber were produced somewhere else? where would that be? what would be the impacts to the tax base, etc.?”
Then there’s non-market values of all shapes, sizes and descriptions, and timelines.
I think that’s what NWTF (NWTF received 50 mill for a master stewardship agreement, this is just a piece) as trying to get at here..
The process of moving timber by railcar in previous years was viewed as an outdated method, as it was considered unprofitable for companies seeking to create forest products. However, considering the immense ecological value (i.e., wildfire risk reduction, carbon optimization, watershed health, wildlife habitat, etc.), the process has the potential to set the precedent for getting fuels out of the forest and transformed into carbon-storing forest products. [NWTF, USDA Begin Restoration, Timber Transit as part of Master Stewardship Agreement]
There’s also concern for disadvantaged communities. Hulett isn’t in one, according to EPA’s map but there are sections of South Dakota that are. it looks like an hour or so away.
In 2020 Neiman bought Interfor Corporation’s specialty sawmill in the Klamath County town of Gilchrist, Oregon near where the logs will be loaded. Neiman owns the Klamath Northern Railway which connects to the Union Pacific. The UP intersects with Burlington Northern Santa Fe at Crawford, Nebraska and the BNSF has sidings in Upton, Wyoming. To minimize the movement of insects and diseases the 33 and 16.5 foot fire salvage ponderosa pine logs will be peeled and shipped to Upton then trucked to Neiman’s mill.
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It appears to me that Neiman is successfully running the Montrose and Gilchrist mills, so the he and the folks he works with know a lot about this and have been successful. Maybe once they figures this out, someone will entrepreneur a sawmill in California. Who knows? I’m with the Chief on this one, let’s give it a try. There’s the old story of a CEO who said “we have enough people warning about a flood, bring me someone who can build an ark.”
I’m interested in the workings of the journalism-academia-agency-practitioner ecosystem and how these interact to shape how many of us see the world. When I first read this E&E News story on the (thanks to a TSW reader) “logs on trains” issue- the idea of sending logs from California to Wyoming. The next post will be on that topic. This post is a reflection on how hard it was to get input from knowledgeable economists on this issue.
Aside.. culturally, I was trained that “appearance of conflict of interest is to be avoided”. Fortunately for us, we can see the work of the reporter over time has not changed, but for Politico I don’t think it’s a good look.
As you may recall, a few years ago I became curious about “why the economics are such that British Columbia can export chips to Asia, but the US cannot?”. As I wandered through various faculties at universities, it appears that “economists who know about forest products” were either vanishing, or difficult to locate. The only people I had any success with were emeriti (plural of emeritus?) professors.
***Note: I am not being criticizing universities here. Institutions of higher education need to follow the scientific trends and money to stay in business. At the land-grants, this has always been a tension, as attracting federal research grants and serving the research needs of the citizens of the state can be in tension. In some cases, this tension is resolved by hiring the people solving more practical problems in extension appointments, which in some cases makes these folks more difficult to locate.
For example, but the holder of the SJ Hall Chair in Forest Economics at one of my alma maters, UC Berkeley, studies a variety of things not in the same bailiwick. Here’s a link to his lab’s website.
And yet there are practical economists helping people solve problems in the Forest Service and Cooperative Extension. So for a reporter (or me) it can be hard to find the experts. There are some in the Forest Service I know, but for them to speak to reporters requires approval of the public affairs shop. This can be simple sometimes and difficult other times, at least that’s been my experience. And unlike The Smokey Wire, reporters usually have some kind of timeline. Plus one might imagine a Forest Service economist would be quite careful talking about something with policy implications- the things we are most curious about. So at the worst, this is some form of “those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.” Then there’s also a generation gap where many of the old stalwarts of the field recently retired, new people have been hired, but they’re not yet at the same level of knowledge and experience as those they’ve replaced. That’s even if their supervisors want them to study the same things. So it’s all very complex.
Consequently, as a result of university hiring and government grants, we might be missing an entire story when it comes to “getting rid of wood waste” or “getting the highest value from wood waste.” And we might even wonder whether the efforts of the last thirty years or so of trying to develop markets for small-diameter material might have been assisted by the presence of more academics studying the problems and working toward solutions. Isn’t that the point of having experts? To help find solutions and be knowledgeable of what is working and what isn’t?
Maybe it’s just me hankering for a simpler world where there were identifiable experts in useful subjects at our (land grant) schools. I’m not really expecting this from other schools, as it isn’t part of their mission. When I look at what the current faculty is studying, with notable exceptions, it seems more abstract with quite a bit of international work, and it seems that there are actually fewer social scientists (including economists) percentage-wise than in the past. Of course, the departments were different then, and I’m comparing the old forestry to the current department of environmental science, policy and management. Is it still possible to identify the State’s problems (like small-diameter material products and markets) and hire scientists to work collaboratively and help solve them?
Is this happening instead at another campus? How would we find out?
It seems that all this makes reporting, at least in our forest space, much more difficult than it needs to be. So please share the names of any experts you have found out there..
This photo from the Rewilding Institute’s website is attributed to George Wuerthner who is a member of their Leadership Council
It’s interesting to watch how different ENGO’s look at different projects where Indigenous people have an interest one way or another. If you folow these issues, you have to be very careful as often the ENGO’s don’t mention in their press releases when they disagree with Native communities, but do mention them when their interests align. Of course, I don’t blame the ENGO’s, they are just marketing their points of view as best they can. It’s pretty much the reporters who have to ask the questions, and seek out information on Indigenous views.
Defenders of Wildlife is widely considered to be an ENGO with the ear of the current Administration (and some previous ones).
Here’s a piece from their website with nary a mention of who wants the road and why, only that the gravel road would be “commercial.”
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will revisit a decision that upheld a land exchange that would make way for a road that would run through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. On November 10, the court threw out the Trump-era decision and ordered a rehearing of the case.
Upon hearing the news, Defenders of Wildlife’s President and CEO Jamie Rappaport Clark released the following statement:
“We are grateful the Ninth Circuit has chosen to rehear this case and reconsider a deeply flawed decision. Defenders of Wildlife is optimistic that the court will ultimately reject this illegal land exchange and protect the irreplaceable wilderness and wildlife habitat of Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.”
Before the case went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, two Alaska District Court decisions rejected such an exchange. The Biden administration defended the Trump era land swap on appeal. A three judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled 2 to 1 in March that the Interior Secretary could use the land exchange provision of ANILCA to gut a National Wildlife Refuge and congressionally designated Wilderness Area without congressional approval. The panel also found that ANILCA’s purposes include providing economic benefits to the State and corporations within it, contrary to the law’s plain language explaining that it is intended to protect conservation and subsistence in Alaska.
That court’s decision upheld a land swap designed to make way for a commercial gravel road in Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. Law firm Trustees for Alaska filed a petition for rehearing en banc in April 2022 asking the entire Ninth Circuit Court to review the split court decision that threatens Izembek lands, waters and animals, and has dangerous and expansive implications for all public lands in Alaska.
Trustees for Alaska represents nine groups in the lawsuit including Defenders of Wildlife. They also represent Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges, Alaska Wilderness League, the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Refuge Association, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, and Wilderness Watch.
It’s interesting that many of these groups, known to be close with the Biden Admin, split with them on this issue.
The Rewilding Institute was more upfront about who wanted the road and why, and why Rewilding thinks they are wrong..
The Biden Administration, with the apparent support of Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, has sided with Alaskan Natives and the previous Trump Administration to approve the construction of a road through the designated wilderness of Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge….
Other Alaskan native groups support the land exchange, likely because they believe they could use the precedent to further their own economic interests.
I had never heard this one before, it’s a bit of an argument that the Native Alaskans are not negotiating in good faith..
The Aleut people living in the village of King Cove claim they need the road for medical emergencies so that injured people can readily access an all-weather runway in nearby Cold Bay, a former military base.
Currently, access to Cold Bay’s runway is by boat or from a smaller airstrip in King Cove. But in stormy weather, travel by any means, including by road, is often dangerous and difficult. This situation is by no means unique to King Cove. Many Alaskan villages are far from hospitals and infrastructure that many Americans take for granted.
However, many wilderness advocates believe the real reason for the road is to carry fish captured by the commercial fishing fleet in King Cove to planes in Cold Bay for rapid shipment to markets.
I appreciate (although don’t agree with) the consistency of this group.. they don’t seem to care whether people are Indigenous or not, we are all equally subordinate to their vision of economic development for communities that want it, or “access to the same infrastructure that many Americans” have as a bad thing.
Mostly we tend to think of this as a tendency of international ENGOs (we developed and used resources, but we think you shouldn’t, for environmental reasons) but apparently this is not an entirely international phenomenon.
said Secretary Deb Haaland. “By acknowledging and empowering Tribes as partners in co-stewardship of our country’s lands and waters, every American will benefit from strengthened management of our federal land and resources.”
Of course, federal authorities stay the same, that is, to consult and not go with what Tribes want. It seems to be a focus on the process (consultation) rather than the product (decisions that Tribes agree with). This sounds like a bit of an echo of ordinary public involvement. We can have a great process and not decide the way any particular group wants. But the term “co-management” to me implies more than “we listen to your opinion more carefully than other groups”. But if the Admin can still overrule Tribes, are they any more “empowered” than before an enhanced consultation process?
There’s also the scale thing. For example, when DOI had their public session on oil and gas regulations, that I covered here, Tribes and Native Alaskans said they were for “all of the above” and yet this did not seem to transfer directly to DOI policy. Perhaps the scale is the problem, and Tribes should be consulted on the overall decarbonization- climate- energy policy in its entirety. Because the solar-wind-minerals-uranium under all scenarios would occur on federal lands. To the extent that it does, maybe the USG should back up and consult on the broader-scale policy- both energy and climate. Perhaps have an elected Tribal representative in all White House climate discussions?
Anyway, here’s a story from “This is Reno” on Tribes suing the BLM:
Three Native American tribes filed this week a new lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management over Lithium Americas planned Thacker Pass lithium mine.
The lawsuit comes after federal Judge Miranda Du mostly ruled against the plaintiffs seeking to stop the project near the Nevada-Oregon border. It was filed Thursday by the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Burns Paiute Tribe and Summit Lake Paiute Tribe in Federal District Court.
The tribes are alleging BLM withheld information from the state “and lied about the extent of tribal consultation in order to secure legally required concurrence about historic properties” at Thacker Pass. They are also alleging BLM lied and misled the tribes about other aspects of the mining project.
“The new lawsuit is also strengthened by the addition of the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, one of the Tribes that the BLM claims to have consulted with prior to issuing the [record of decision],” they said in a press statement. “Summit Lake and both other tribes the BLM claims to have consulted (the Winnemucca Indian Colony and Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe) have disputed BLM’s assertion that any consultation took place.”
The Winnemucca Indian Colony, they said, was unable to intervene in the case for not filing soon enough.
“When the decision was made public on the previous lawsuit last week, we said we would continue to advocate for our sacred site PeeHee Mu’Huh,” said Arlan Melendez, chair of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. “It is also the very same place where our people were massacred (never laid to rest properly) by the U.S. Calvary. It’s a place where all Paiute and Shoshone people continue to pray, gather medicines and food, honor our non-human relatives, honor our water, honor our way of life, honor our ancestors.
“The Thacker Pass permitting process was not done correctly. BLM contends they have discretion to decide who to notify or consult with,” he added. “They only contacted 3 out of the 22 tribes who had significant ties to Thacker Pass.”
“Democrats and Republicans are both pro-development in this state and always have been,” Lokken said.
Some Democrats are more likely to be concerned about the environmental impact of mining and about ensuring that the state gets tax revenue from the industry, added Lokken, but development has ultimately won out.
“The party decided a long ago that this kind of development is fine,” he said.
I thought this was funny, it’s from Guido Núñez-Mujica of The Breakthrough Institute and used with his permission. No, I don’t addressing climate mitigation in forest plans is like this, except we could substitute emissions from recreation, wildfire, grazing, timber and so on..not to speak of what we used to call “sustainable operations” or the workings of the agency itself.
From Guido Núñez-Mujica here https://twitter.com/OSGuido/status/1628833580649684992/photo/1
Now it’s time to share your examples of climate in forest plans.. I posted on some possible ways to look at “how well” forest plans deal with climate change last week. As I said before, one of my contacts had been asked “what forest plans do you consider to have handled climate change best”. So this thread is an opportunity for anyone to weigh in on the forest plans you have worked with, and what you think.
How does addressing climate change make a difference in desired conditions (maybe resilience, but I think many folks are managing for that anyway via projects), standards and guidelines, land allocation and other plan-level decisions?
That’s precisely what we should be able to see in some of the new forest plans. So please let us know what you think!
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In a research paper to be discussed later this week, the authors state:
Forest planning is a relatively obscure and byzantine policy process for most ordinary citizens. In contrast, it is a high priority to interest groups because of the ability to impact long-term outcomes on the national forests.
I will be interesting to see who has actually read forest plans (and EIS’s) among us. For one thing, they are so very complex (obscure and byzantine, as the authors said). For another thing, an individual’s opinion probably does not matter much, so in the weighting of spending of time, reading plans may not rank highly. There seem to be no powerful interest groups representing “general interest” or “recreation tolerance” or even “resilient ecosystems”- the latter concept seems to get broken down into the same old “manage vegetation or not”; even when there isn’t a timber industry to speak of. So I think it will be interesting to see who among us has taken the time to read what’s in them and why.
Finally, for those who are following individual forest plans, it would also be interesting to track whether and how climate change comes up in forest plan-related litigation. And whether “integrity” and “resilience” are ever in tension- seems like they might be.
Sadly, this E&E news article appears to not be available even to those with a Greenwire subscription. Below is from this E&E News story. It was interesting that it requires some kind of higher level of subscription ($) than some have to access it.
Westerman’s ascension all but guarantees that it will be a tough year for the park service on Capitol Hill. He said NPS and other agencies have had it far too easy under Democratic control during the last two years and that it’s time for the committee to step up its oversight.
When Congress first passed the landmark Great American Outdoors Act in 2020, Westerman called it “a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” saying he backed it as a step in the right direction but questioned whether it would go far enough. He and other Republicans now say the evidence is now clear: While the law promised to give NPS up to $6.5 billion over a five-year period, the agency’s backlog has only
ballooned, going from roughly $12 billion in 2018 to a record high of more than $22 billion at the end of 2022.
….
In a May letter to Haaland, they first complained that the agency had “alarmingly” proposed spending 30 percent of its money under the Great American Outdoors Act this year to pay for overhead costs rather than specific projects. “I promise you that’s not what I had in mind when we set up the Great American Outdoors Act to fix infrastructure in our federal lands,” Westerman said in the interview.
In a July letter, Westerman and other Republicans said that NPS had prioritized “relatively obscure park units in urban areas” over its “crown jewels” in rural areas. As proof, they said some top parks were omitted from the fiscal 2023 project list even though they had large maintenance backlogs, including Yosemite, Zion, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain national parks.
They have also questioned why NPS decided to spend $161 million to rehabilitate the George Washington Memorial Highway in suburban Washington, and nearly $166 million on two park sites in the San Francisco congressional district represented by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D), saying the money could have been better spent elsewhere.
The Republicans asked the agency for “a full accounting of all funds,” along with all documents and communications — including emails — that show how projects have been prioritized.
NPS declined to comment on the committee’s oversight plans.
I could hazard a guess as to why those sites were picked-the term “pork” comes to mind. Fortunately the Daily Caller reported on this from last May and it is available via the House Natural Resources website:
In the letter, Westerman and the other Republicans noted that the administration’s budget suggested that funds appropriated under Great American Outdoors Act’s (GAOA) Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF) were being given to “overhead costs” instead of specific projects as the bill intended when it was passed in 2020. The program awards several Interior Department (DOI) and Agriculture Department (USDA) subagencies a total of $1.9 billion per year between 2021-2025 for park restoration projects.
“Despite the intention of GAOA to address real deferred maintenance needs, portions of funds are dedicated to administrative costs and contingency funds,” the Republicans wrote to Haaland and Vilsack. “Alarmingly, more than 30 percent of FY 2023 [National Park Service (NPS)] Legacy Restoration Funds are dedicated to overhead costs, rather than obligated to specific projects.
They added that between 13-17% of the LRF funds allocated to the Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service were also earmarked for overhead costs.
Looking at the bill text, it’s not clear to me that they explicitly stated “no overhead”. Conceivably agencies could charge, say 60% or so overhead, like research universities. It doesn’t seem fair that the Park Service charges so much more than the other agencies.. which didn’t seem to raise any eyebrows. Maybe Congress should put in a cap, now that they know how much, say the FS charges. Or as I suggested, a greater percentage of the total funding be allocated to the agencies with lower overheads.
Also of interest in the bill is the requirement that:
Submission of Annual List of Projects to Congress.–Until the date on which all of the amounts in the Fund are expended, the President shall annually submit to Congress, together with the annual budget of the United States, a list of projects to be funded from the Fund that includes a detailed description of each project, including the estimated expenditures from the Fund for the project for the applicable fiscal year.
So conceivably, Congress has a chance to weigh in on each agency’s list. Anyone with more info on how this works, please add in comments.
There are many AGW-Climate Change philosophical differences that are out there that may influence forest planning. I’m sure there are more that readers can add. I’ll use “you” to mean a forest or other planning entity.
1. How do you handle uncertainties about future climates? How explicit are you about them? How do you treat model outputs, or like Denver Water, do you use a pretty broad uncertainty envelope? How do you combine uncertainties about climate with uncertainties about other things.. population, recreation use, economics? Do you use scenarios and involve the public, or what is your approach to discussing uncertainties with the public? (this was discussed more generally in the previous post).
2. I give adaptive management its own category here because it is something that the FS (and BLM?) were supposed to be doing, but may have had trouble. At least at the level that some have talked about it (extremely formalized, scientist design, and so on). Perhaps at the District human being observational level or the specialist level (say fuels or wildlife or reforestation) it is working just fine using old-fangled communication- person to person and through professional groups. But maybe different “adaptive management” aficionados simply mean different things by their use of the term. How is adaptive management currently working on the forest, and how is the plan going to help- does it have a role; what are the requirements of the 2012 Rule on this, and how are they being applied?
3. Climate mitigation. Seems like we mostly hear about SOSO (same old same old) with regard to mitigation. ENGOs who didn’t want to cut trees now say it’s bad for carbon. ENGO’s who don’t like cattle grazing say it’s bad for methane. Less fossil fuel leasing seems like it would be mitigation, until you analyze it and discover that the sources simply move to private land or offshore. And what about recreation? Most recreators, myself included, use vehicles to access NF lands that are powered by fossil fuels directly or via electrical sources. What are the key issues in the plan vis a vis mitigation?
4. There’s also a bit of meta-thinking that I call Climate Everythingism.
To some, climate now the mantle for everything- other environmental issues, all natural hazards, as we have seen with EPA, CEQ, and many media outlets now have environment as a subset of climate. Check out the WaPo main page where Environment is a subset of Climate.
Others think that climate another source of uncertainty, like population and economics, which all need to be addressed through planning- and it is the role of each discipline to learn about what CC means for their resource.
Most Everythingists I’ve met consider themselves to be “climate experts” (whether I would consider them that or not). But for every Forest Service Everythingist who thinks we need climate specialists advising on each project, there is someone outside the Forest Service who thinks the agency itself can be done away with and replaced by a Climate Adaptation Agency staffed with.. climate experts.
I often find what is least talked about in these discussions are the disciplinary and authority implications of Everythingism, as well as moving the locus of knowledge and authority away from experts on the ground and the people most affected. At its worst Everythingism could be a systemic antagonist to the idea of empowering disadvantaged communities. I find Everythingists not usually involved with forest planning, but their ideas are in the atmosphere, and may well be among partners and the public, so I think it’s something to be aware of.
Addition: I just ran a across a job ad for a Climate Editor at Vox Media on Linked-In. Under “About the Job” it says:
Climate change is the most important story in the world. It’s no longer a looming consequence in the far-off future, but rather a present challenge that’s forcing all of us to adapt. Wildlife and natural habitats are disappearing, driving a biodiversity crisis.
If you’re an Everythingist, I suppose biodiversity is a subset of climate. It’s a mantle that you can place over everything, except perhaps non-native invasive species. But we don’t hear about the latter much anymore.
Please add your own philosophical differences that may affect the approach to climate change in forest plans.
This is the first of a series of posts that lay out a framework for thinking about how forest plans address climate change. Some people are curious as to what we might think are the forest plans that have handled climate change the best, and so we’ll have a post later that will ask that question.
But I think we need to be upfront on where we stand on different approaches or philosophies for how AGW-CC (I’ll just call it CC for the rest of these posts) should be handled. It seems to me that there are two components to this question: first, do you agree with the approach of how they handled it, and second, given their approach, how well do you think they handled it?
I hope by consciously thinking about how diverse approaches might work, we might be able to contemplate the true diversity of approaches in addition to what is in current forest plans.
One of the things I did around 2010-ish was help forests in Region 2 develop their “climate action plans”, I think they were called. I was the climate change coordinator for the Region, so I was on some of the conference calls. The interesting thing about this effort was that it was not tied to NFMA planning, but more about “are there things we are doing we would do differently if we considered climate change?”. In many cases, they already were considering CC and the plan simply documented how they were thinking about it.
Our Regional view was to use generic scenarios based on down-scaled models (I mean really generalized, like “hotter and drier” generalized) and to use a “no regrets” strategy.
Just now I tried to find a definition for “no regrets’ strategies and discovered a plethora of literature with not-exactly-identical definitions.
But I liked this one from Law Insider (!)
no regrets means taking climate-related decisions or actions and/or investments that can be justified from economic, social, and environmental perspectives whether or not a specific climate threat materializes in the future, and this is achieved by building resilience to different hazards/risks (Heltberg, Siegel, Jorgensen, 2009; Siegel, 2011).
Well, Region 2, if I can generalize, has always been a relatively poor Region and employees are pretty pragmatic and don’t tend to overthink things.
So we ran through some of this stuff with one forest (may have been the Nebraska) and the conversation went something like this:
“So we need to protect our riparian areas because it might get hotter and drier?” a Forest employee asked.
“Right,” we said.
“And we need to monitor what we do to be sure it works as the climate is changing?”
“Yes,” we agreed.
“In other words, for climate we should be doing the things we were already supposed to be doing?”
“Well, there are some differences, but.. pretty much.”
*********************
That was perhaps too minimalist for some. Today I’d add consciously managing for resilience.
But why not manage for resilience under a variety of future climate (and other) scenarios? When we visited Denver Water and looked at their scenario planning, climate wasn’t the only unknown. At the time, they also considered different plausible scenarios about populations and their uses of water. If you look at their website, they are not even sure about hotter and drier, but also include hotter and wetter.
Denver Water is adapting to, and addressing, climate change through what it calls “scenario planning.” That means building flexibility into its operations and decisions to prepare for a range of plausible futures climate change could bring. Simply put, those scenarios range from warmer and wetter to hotter and drier.
“Uncertainty is the name of the game going forward,” said Laurna Kaatz, Denver Water’s climate program manager. “We don’t know exactly how it will unfold on the ground, but we do know it’s going to keep warming. Climate change is here and now.”
Then there’s resilience of communities to climate hazards (or things now defined to be “climate” hazards such as drought, wildfire, and flooding). For example, in this Western Watersheds Assessment study plan,
but could take the form of collaborative scenario planning processes that engage diverse stakeholders to explore climate projections, sources of vulnerability, and strategies for increasing resilience.
Which sounds like what the FS may have done a while back (at least some forests did this with the aid of FS R&D) . And of course, community resilience is related to economics, so that ties back to a topic that fits forest planning.
Next time: Some Categories for Climate Approaches in Forest Plans
