climate change

NY Times article on Dave Cleaves, FS Climate Czar

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Interesting article on Dave and current FS climate change efforts here.

Also, I think the chosen advertisement at the Times site is interesting, for Hidden Gems by Pew Environment. I always find the advocacy/analysis tension at Pew to be interesting.

For example on their homepage:

“The Pew Charitable Trusts is driven by the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems. Pew applies a rigorous, analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life.”

Creekside Ruminations on Climate Change from Bark Beetle Country

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A couple of weeks ago, I was on a field trip on part of the old Routt National Forest, when I had to take a climate change conference call. Since cell phone coverage was spotty, we targeted a good spot and I was dropped off for a couple of hours and sat at creekside while on the calls.

Looking at the dead trees on the hills, it became clearer to me some of the disconnects between climate change as talked about or written about in scientific journals, and as currently lived.

1. People are already dealing with climate change every day as part of their work.
People are felling hazard trees, doing WUI fuels treatments, looking for biomass opportunities, etc. Climate change is just another change agent that affects our work.

2. We may never know how much of what we observe is due to climate change (take bark beetles; 100% climate change? 75% climate change plus the age of trees 25% ?). But we still have to deal with the changes, regardless of their source. So it probably doesn’t make sense to have a separate pot of funds for climate change adaptation or resilience- otherwise we might spend out time in tedious disagreements about whose problem is more climate-induced.

3. We will be dealing with these issues collaboratively, locally (for the most part) using an all lands approach, and involving regulators and communities early and often.

We can’t or shouldn’t get to the point where the community and the FS are in one place, but the regulators have a different worldview.

4. Climate change will include opportunities as well as hazards and difficulties.

For example, at the Steamboat Ski Area, we visited a site where dead trees provided an opportunity for a children’s outdoor ski run.

5. It could be argued that the complex structure of direction in the Forest Service does not make us as flexible and adaptive as we need to be. Changes due to climate change and other factors can occur more quickly, and in different spatial/temporal configurations, than the current structure can easily respond to.

For example, the ranger district or forest is the right scale for many decisions. But not for bark beetles. Should it be dealt with by the current three forests? An interior west scale group? What would be the governance of such a group?
We have the incident command model for fires.. but if something is large, but not a month by month kind of emergency, do we have an organizational structure to deal with it?

6. Safety of our employees and the public need to come first.
I don’t know at the end of the day how many climate change issues will have real safety hazards such as bark beetle and other sources of dead trees. The urgency requires new ways of working together in a timely way. Environmental groups, industry groups, local communities, regulators- we all need to be able to speed up from our bureaucratic and legal natural rate of speed to an emergency rate of speed.

7. If ecosystems are too complex to predict (“more complex than we think, more complex than we can think”), let’s use scenarios and not specific predictions, and pick “no-regrets” strategies. I wonder sometimes if we are overthinking and overanalyzing climate changes and I think we should consider the opportunity costs of what we could to to “protect reconnect and restore” in the Trout Unlimited strategy versus “assess, predict and model.” Note that while common sense and decision theory under uncertainty have always argued for “no regrets” strategies, now at least some water scientists agree.

I would ask us to think about that climate change may be a stressor to our organizational and social systems as well as the environment. It requires us to work together faster, and better than we have in the past. I often wonder if climate science funding were divided half to social scientists (with one quarter to business and public administration schools), what would the “best available science” look like?

I’d be curious about others’ ruminations on these topics…

New USDA Plan Sets Forest Restoration, Climate, Water, Fire Objectives

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National Forests and “private working lands” are prominently featured in the new U.S. Department of Agriculture five-year strategic plan released last week.  The plan contains strategic objectives for National Forests to restore ecosystems and watersheds on both private and public lands.  It also contains objectives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase carbon sequestration, and develop climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies for National Forests. 

One of the four strategic goals for the Department of Agriculture (besides assistance to rural communities, promoting agriculture production, and nutritious food for kids) is goal #2: “Ensure our National Forests and private working lands are conserved, restored, and made more resilient to climate change, while enhancing our water resources.” 

The plan calls for a collaborative “all lands” approach to bring public and private owners together across landscapes and ecosystems.  “Private working lands” are defined to include farms, ranches, grasslands, private forest lands, and retired cropland.  The plan is intended to coordinate National Forest System programs with other USDA programs for private lands. 

Restoration of watershed and forest health is intended to be a core management objective of the National Forests and Grasslands.  Objective 2.1 is to “restore and conserve the Nation’s forests, farms, ranches and grasslands.”  The plan calls for a 13% increase in forest lands that are restored or enhanced each year.

Objective 2.2 calls for efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  It sets an 8% increase in carbon sequestration on U.S. lands and an 8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the agricultural sector.  All National Forests must have a climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy.

Objective 2.3 calls for protection and enhancement of water resources.  It calls for an increase in National Forest System (NFS) watersheds at or near natural conditions from 58 million acres (30 percent of NFS lands) to 62 million acres (32 percent of NFS lands).   Acres of restored wetlands would increase from 2.1 million acres per year to 2.3 million acres per year.  There would be an $0.5 billion increase in flood prevention and water supply projects.  Nine million acres of high impact targeted practices would be implemented to accelerate the protection of clean, abundant water resources.

Objective 2.4 calls for a reduction of the risk of catastropic wildfire and restoring fire to its appropriate place on the landscape.  It sets a desired condition within the natural (historical) range of variability of vegetation characteristics, increasing the cumulative number of acres from 58.5 million to 61.5 million acres.  It calls for an increase from 10,000 to 18,000 communities with reduced risk from catastropic wildfire, and an increase from 41 percent to 55 percent of acres in Wildland-Urban Interface that have been treated.

The Woody Biomass for Energy Debate- Manomet Study

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As I watch the climate debate, I’ve noticed that biomass has a bad rep in some climate circles. Sometimes it is as simple as biomass is ethanol ethanol is bad therefore biomass is bad. Sometimes it is more nuanced. Seldom is it discussed in a way that reflects differences among places and the variety of possible technologies and material to be used.

Last weekend there was an article in the NY Times on a Manomet study. In this Q&A, John Hagan and Thomas Walker go into some depth describing their findings. Here are some considerations:

The framework we developed for carbon accounting could be used for an individual power facility, a state, a country, or even the European Union (which is importing wood chips from the U.S. and other countries to meet its renewable-energy goals). In order to assess the greenhouse gas implications of using wood for energy, you have to know four things:

• The life cycle of the wood (e.g., logging debris, whole trees, trees vulnerable to catastrophic events) in the absence of the biomass energy opportunity.

• The type of energy that will be generated (heat, electricity, combined heat and electricity), because different types have different efficiencies and thus different CO2 emissions profiles.

• The type of fossil fuel being displaced (coal, oil, or natural gas), because different fuels have different emissions profiles.

• The management of the forest — management can either slow or accelerate forest growth, and therefore recovery of carbon from the atmosphere.

To further complicate the story, while our life cycle analysis looked at greenhouse gas emissions from production and transport of both biomass and fossil fuels, we couldn’t evaluate every possible environmental impact of energy production, such as broken blowout preventers 5,000 feet under water or mountaintop removals to access coal. Rarely (maybe never) does society really weigh the full array of costs and benefits of our decisions. But as the world gets more complicated, and as resources get more scarce, and as the human population climbs to nine billion (and then some), we’re going to have to become more serious about analyzing these kinds of trade-offs.

And

But our study suggests that it’s important to be specific about how you define biomass. Energy generation from harvests of live whole trees from natural forests has different life cycle implications than energy generation from wood wastes that otherwise would have released their carbon to the atmosphere relatively quickly. The choice of biomass energy generation technologies also matters. Biomass fueling thermal and combined heat and power systems typically produce greenhouse gas benefits sooner than large-scale biomass electricity generation.

Finally, we’d emphasize that there are many other considerations besides greenhouse gas emissions when making energy policy — these include energy security, air quality, forest recreation values, local economics, other environmental impacts of extracting fossil fuels (and not just greenhouse gas emissions of burning fossil fuels), and quality of place, among others. Policymakers need to weigh all these factors in making energy policy.

What we’ve done is put a much sharper point on one piece of the story — greenhouse gas emissions. Until our study came out, it was widely assumed that using wood for energy was immediately carbon- neutral. How this new insight factors into the public’s view of using wood for energy remains to be seen.

As for Manomet, our role is to inform society with science, with the hope that a better informed society will make better decisions.

The Hartwell Paper and A New Forest Planning Rule

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For those of you who aren’t familiar with this paper, it was a recent effort to figure out if another approach to climate policy could be more successful.

Here is quote from Mike Hulme in this essay on the Hartwell paper .

To move forward, we believe a startling proposition must be understood and accepted. It is not possible to have a “climate policy” that has emissions reduction as the all-encompassing and driving goal.

We advocate inverting and fragmenting the conventional approach: accepting that taming climate change will only be achieved successfully as a benefit contingent upon other goals that are politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic. Without a fundamental re-framing of the issue, new mandates will not be granted for any fresh courses of action, even good ones.

The paper’s first primary goal focuses on access; to ensure that the basic needs, especially the energy demands, of the world’s growing population are adequately met.

The second is a sustainability goal; to ensure that we develop in a manner that balances social, economic and ecological goals.

Third is a resilience goal; to ensure that our societies are adequately equipped to withstand the risks and dangers that come from all the vagaries of climate, whatever their cause.

Most regular readers of this blog will know that my approach to climate change for public lands is basically:
1. Do all the things we know we should have been doing (monitor and adapt in a transparent disciplined way)
2. Preferentially protect the fundamentals, especially water and air. There is no correct or incorrect composition of plants and animals, now or in the future.
3. Connect landscapes through riparian and other corridors.
4. Use land trades to decrease fragmentation of public lands and open areas to solar or wind development.
5. Develop sustainable biomass industries where needed to conduct fuels treatment or for ecological resilience.

I am also a big fan of Trout Unlimited’s “protect, reconnect and restore” as described in their “Healing Troubled Waters” document here.

So here’s the question- think about Hulme’s concepts, my concepts, TU’s concepts and your own concepts of what to do about climate change… what is the public lands piece to you? And what, if any of that should fit into a planning rule?