Sierra Club Agrees with “Right Wing Groups and R Politicians” on NACs: NY Times Article

I always like it when seemingly unusual combinations of people agree.  Here’s an NY Times story. Their headline is a little different from mine (it’s an economic reporter in the economy section).

Nature Has Value. Could We Literally Invest in It?

“Natural asset companies” would put a market price on improving ecosystems, rather than on destroying them.

We’ve discussed this before.. what could go wrong with the financial industry getting involved in land management? They’ve done so well with the mortgage industry. And at that time, their regulators were either in bed with the regulated, and/or asleep at the wheel.  But since they apologized and paid everyone back, we should give them a second chance.  They didn’t?

If there are willing buyers and sellers, conceivably the buyers could get more from selling ecosystem services without folks at financial markets taking their cut. It’s interesting that in the first few paragraphs, it’s characterized as “right-wing groups and R politicians are against it and “even” conservationists wary of Wall Street. Note also that Mr. Eger has the chance to respond to concerns in the article; it’s interesting to see who has a chance to respond and how far the back and forth goes.   Also the public lands question isn’t mentioned, which I think caused the concern of western R’s.

Picture this: You own a few hundred acres near a growing town that your family has been farming for generations. Turning a profit has gotten harder, and none of your children want to take it over. You don’t want to sell the land; you love the open space, the flora and fauna it hosts. But offers from developers who would turn it into subdivisions or strip malls seem increasingly tempting.

One day, a land broker mentions an idea. How about granting a long-term lease to a company that values your property for the same reasons you do: long walks through tall grass, the calls of migrating birds, the way it keeps the air and water clean.

It sounds like a scam. Or charity. In fact, it’s an approach backed by hardheaded investors who think nature has an intrinsic value that can provide them with a return down the road — and in the meantime, they would be happy to hold shares of the new company on their balance sheets.

Such a company doesn’t yet exist. But the idea has gained traction among environmentalists, money managers and philanthropists who believe that nature won’t be adequately protected unless it is assigned a value in the market — whether or not that asset generates dividends through a monetizable use.

The concept almost hit the big time when the Securities and Exchange Commission was considering a proposal from the New York Stock Exchange to list these “natural asset companies” for public trading. But after a wave of fierce opposition from right-wing groups and Republican politicians, and even conservationists wary of Wall Street, in mid-January the exchange pulled the plug.

That doesn’t mean natural asset companies are going away; their proponents are working on prototypes in the private markets to build out the model. And even if this concept doesn’t take off, it’s part of a larger movement motivated by the belief that if natural riches are to be preserved, they must have a price.

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A scam with the best of intentions for using the money is still.. a scam.  Was the SBF trial so long ago?

So in 2017, Mr. Eger founded the Intrinsic Exchange Group with the goal of incubating natural asset companies, NACs for short. Here’s how it works: A landowner, whether a farmer or a government entity, works with investors to create a NAC that licenses the rights to the ecosystem services the land produces. If the company is listed on an exchange, the proceeds from the public offering of shares would provide the landowner with a revenue stream and pay for enhancing natural benefits, like havens for threatened species or a revitalized farming operation that heals the land rather than leaching it dry.

If all goes according to plan, investments in the company would appreciate as environmental quality improves or demand for natural assets increases, yielding a return years down the road — not unlike art, or gold or even cryptocurrency.

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Unexpected Headwinds

Mr. Eger was dismayed. The most powerful forces arrayed against natural asset companies were people who wanted land to remain available for uses like coal mining and oil drilling, a fundamental disagreement about what’s good for the world.

OK, well for sure I’m not a powerful force.  But are we willing to take Mr. Eger’s word for the “forces arrayed against” the idea? Might they have interviewed one of the R politicians for example?

But opponents also made spurious arguments about the risks of his plan, Mr. Eger said. Landowners would decide whether and how to set up a NAC, and existing laws still applied. What’s more, foreign governments can and do buy up large tracts of land directly; a license to the land’s ecological performance rights would create no new dangers.

There is also pushback, however, from people who strongly believe in protecting natural resources, and worry that monetizing the benefits would further enrich the wealthy without reliably delivering the promised environmental upside.

“If investors want to pay a landowner to improve their soil or protect a wetland, that’s great,” said Ben Cushing, the director of the Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign. “I think we’ve seen that when that is turned into a financial asset that has a whole secondary market attached to it, it creates a lot of distortions.” Another environmental group, Save the World’s Rivers, filed a comment opposing the plan partly because it said the valuation framework centered on nature’s use to humans, rather than other living things.

To Debbie Dekleva, who lives in Ogallala, Neb., the prospect that a natural asset company could enroll large tracts of land seems like a very real threat. For 36 years, her family has worked to commercialize milkweed, a wild plant that produces a strong fiber and is the only thing that the caterpillars of imperiled monarch butterflies will eat. Ms. Dekleva pays local residents to collect the pods from milkweed stands with permission from friendly landowners, and then processes them into insulation, cloth and other products.

That sounds like a type of business that might contribute to a NAC’s value. But Ms. Dekleva suspects that she wouldn’t be part of it — faraway investors and big companies might lock up the rights to milkweed on surrounding land, making it harder for her to operate.

“I think that whoever writes the rules wins,” Ms. Dekleva said. “So let’s say Bayer is doing regenerative agriculture, and they’re going to say, ‘And now we get these biodiversity credits, and we get this, and we get this, and we get this.’ How does someone like me compete with something like that?”

Such opposition — the kind that stems from deep skepticism about financial products that are marketed as solving problems through capitalism, and questions about who is entitled to nature’s gifts — may be hard to dislodge.

Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t really an R/D breakdown.. remember Occupy Wall Street? Also I think PERC is fairly pro.

Mr. Eger said he built safeguards into the proposed rule to guard against concerns like Ms. Dekleva’s. For example, each company’s charter is supposed to include an “equitable benefit sharing policy” that provides for the well-being of local residents and businesses.

It sounds like “trust us, things will be swell.”  Trust is a function of transparency and accountability for Wall Street, just as much as for wildfire practitioners.

For now, Intrinsic will seek to prove the concept in the private markets. The company declined to disclose the parties involved before the deals are closed, but identified a few projects that are close. One is attached to 1.6 million acres owned by a North American tribal entity. Another plans to enroll soybean farms and shift them to more sustainable practices, with investment from a consumer packaged goods company that will buy the crop. (The pilot project in Costa Rica, which Intrinsic envisioned as covering a national park in need of funding to prevent incursions from arsonists and poachers, stalled when a new political party came to power.)

And the concept remains attractive to some landowners who’ve managed to wrap their heads around it. Take Keith Nantz, a cattle rancher who has been trying to build a vertically integrated, sustainable beef operation across the Pacific Northwest. He and a few partners would like to move to less chemically intensive grazing practices, but banks are hesitant to lend on a project that could reduce yields or jeopardize crop insurance coverage.

A natural asset company could be a piece of his financing puzzle. And to Mr. Nantz, the opposition comes mostly from a place of fear.

“There’s nothing being forced by a government or state or organization to be a part of this or not,” he said. “We can choose to be a part of this, and hopefully it’s a great opportunity to bring some capital.”

Again, the public land part is not mentioned. This seems like an unusual oversight for the reporting.

(The pilot project in Costa Rica, which Intrinsic envisioned as covering a national park in need of funding to prevent incursions from arsonists and poachers, stalled when a new political party came to power.)

Why don’t people just give the park money to prevent incursions (hire people to do a potentially dangerous job)?  Why does it need to go through a complex financial instrument with intermediaries getting their cut?  It seems to me that, generally, the history of complex financial instruments has not been good.

The Need for NACs (or Not)

There is a great story in E&E News about NACs or “natural asset companies.”

Investors could soon buy into companies trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a unique dual purpose: protect nature — including on public lands — and make money.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently weighing whether to clear the way for the NYSE to offer a new kind of investment known as “natural asset companies,” or NACs.
The idea proposed by the NYSE is to list companies with missions to improve ecosystems through management, maintenance, or restoration of public or privately-owned lands — and then put a dollar figure on the resulting benefits, like clean air or wildlife habitat.
The proposal so far hasn’t gotten much attention, but caught the notice of conservative lawmakers and property rights advocates. They’ve warned the companies could open a backdoor into strict management restrictions for public lands and waters — as well as foreign investment on federal lands — while raising questions about whether the investments are even viable.

But the financial services firm Intrinsic Exchange Group, which launched the idea two years ago and has drawn support from the NYSE and groups like the Rockefeller Foundation, says it would give investors interested in preserving nature a place to put their money.
“We were looking for a private-sector approach that wasn’t dependent on policy, it wasn’t dependent on traditional taxes, regulation or philanthropy to price in these assets and give investors the opportunity to invest directly in nature, whether that’s for climate or biodiversity,” said IEG Chair Douglas Eger.

I’m neither conservative nor a lawmaker, but I’m skeptical, at least based on this story.

Now I am way above my pay grade with talks of the SEC, but as I said with cap’n’trade, the financial sector does so well policing itself (think 2008, mortgage crisis) we should definitely reward them by handing over … the environment(!)… not.

I think there is a private sector approach to preserving nature.. it’s called “buying land.” Conceivably, people could get together, form a company to “buy land”, and take advantage of all the USDA and private programs (such as PERC talks about) to pay owners for preservation. Seemingly if you were a supporter of this idea, like say, the Rockefeller Foundation (with assets of $7,117,904,789,  you could actually buy quite a chunk!).

On the other hand, I looked at the company proposing this and their supporters

And many of them are in other countries. So maybe those countries have rules about foreigners buying land?

It seems to me that there are three different things that are not clearly delineated:
1. What they want to do in other countries
2. Willing buyer and seller of whatever (I don’t have a problem with that).
3. Selling contracts for certain kinds of management on public lands.

Eger compared their approach to improvements on public lands to a mining claim or a timber lease, or utilizing air rights on private lands.

Eek !Let’s not go back to 1872.. and public (federal) lands don’t actually have “timber leases.” When I think of these, mining claims tend to be limited in time and space; mine themselves are subject to NEPA and public comment (and, dare I say, litigation). Timber sales (and stewardship contracts) are made to carry out decisions agencies made with public involvement.

Instead of a lease to extract ore

There are actually two bills in Congress about redoing the 1872 Mining Act right now..claims are not “leases.”

or cut down trees,

Again, timber sales on federal land are not “leases” they are for specific actions for a specific period of time.

however, NACs would ink agreements granting them “ecological performance rights.” Where a successful mining claim is intended to result in the collection of ore, the value of the ecological rights would be judged on a series of factors, ranging from data on carbon storage and sequestration to more ephemeral qualities like the “sensory benefits” of a nice view.

Critics have targeted the concept as creating companies that would attempt to make money off monetizing aspects of nature that belong to everyone.
“This is creating this whole new category and monetizing things that nobody has a right to own,” said Margaret Byfield, the executive director of the American Stewards of Liberty, a property-rights-focused organization.

This is confusing, because if you were with a “property rights focused” organization, you’d be all for #2 but maybe not for #3.

In order to qualify as a natural asset company, a corporation would need to document how it is improving the lands included in its portfolio.
In broad strokes, a NAC is responsible for the “conservation, restoration, or sustainable management” of those lands, which commit to various goals, such as improving wildlife habitat or ensuring clean air.

But if you include “sustainable management,” what makes them different from BLM or the FS?

Based on these quotes, NYSE and IEG may not be on the same page.. NYSE is a #2 and IEG mentions #3.

“NACs — which have not yet been approved for listing — are a voluntary, free-market decision by a landowner to monetize their assets,” said NYSE spokesperson Lauren Sullivan.
In a document detailing the companies’ structure, IEG notes that lands “can be areas that are publicly owned, such as a national park, or tracts of privately owned property held by individuals or corporations.”

What do elected officials in states with large amounts of public land think about this?

“This rule has wide-ranging implications for the citizens of our states, specifically in our natural resources and agricultural industries,” Govs. Joe Lombardo of Nevada, Greg Gianforte of Montana, Mark Gordon of Wyoming and Brad Little of Idaho wrote in an October letter to the SEC.

The governors also questioned whether the Interior or Agricultural departments had been involved with the proposal. An Interior spokesperson declined to comment, and the USDA did not respond to a request for comment.

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Harris said another complication is the environmental statements and audits these companies would be required to produce — a potentially significant expense.
“The innovation here is that these companies are being given a mechanism by which they can credibly show that they’re doing what they say they’re doing,” Harris said. “And to give investors some confidence that they’re not rapaciously destroying the planet or the environment.”
Eger pushed back against that analysis, arguing that NACs will create a return on investment because individuals choose to value the environment, along with sustainable production of timber or agriculture.

I thought folks like SFC and SFI had already figured out what was sustainable; so conceivably companies that are certified are doing that, and people could invest in them directly.

“There’s no reason that we can’t set a price to ecosystem service,” Eger said. “Between a willing buyer and seller, the underlying becomes true. If they think that value is there, then it is there,” he said, comparing the idea to “the price of paintings or gold.”
He added that while some of the lands have an existing “production value,” whether because of agricultural or other uses, investors into NACs are supporting an “existence or appreciation value” of the benefits of those lands, like support for biodiversity or natural beauty.

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So some people would have the duty of checking on landowners to make sure that they were doing the things they were supposed to be doing, that they wouldn’t otherwise do without the payments.  But there are already a variety of agreements for paying people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. Folks like PERC have examples like paying for elk presence.

Here’s a link to a WSJ op-ed by the treasurer of Utah.

Why would anyone invest in a company that can’t make money? Initial buyers would likely be “impact investors,” committed to sacrificing returns to advance the climate agenda. But it seems clear the goal is to sell NACs to endowments, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and other investors demanding greater direct and immediate ESG presence in their portfolio. Demand from “values-driven investing” alone could drive up NAC share prices even as the value of the assets they purchase decrease by virtue of the NAC’s ownership of them. More disturbing, reducing U.S. mineral extraction could be intriguing to Chinese, Russian or Saudi sovereign wealth funds.

Environmental offsets in the form of carbon credits or government transfers for “conservation uses” could also generate ostensible revenues.

I’m a bit leery of companies buying these things and then pressuring the government for more subsidies. Right now the subsidies go directly to landowner. Getting more financial and auditing middle-people requiring salaries may not be a terribly efficient way of meeting environmental goals. And how are we doing with carbon credits? It seems like where there is big money, there is also a tendency for questionable auditing.. check out this CAP article on carbon offsets.

Also, TNC already has an investment program which sounds a bit like the same thing, without the trading part. Maybe some of our financially-inclined readers can explain the difference?

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management” was written by Steve Ellis, Chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), who is a former U.S. Forest Service Forest Supervisor and retired Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director for Operations—the senior career position in that agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

I have extracted a few snippets (Emphasis added) from the above article published by the NAFSR:

1) Last year was a historically destructive wildfire season. While we haven’t yet seen the end of 2021, nationally 64 large fires have burned over 3 million acres. The economic damage caused by wildfire in 2020 is estimated at $150 billion. The loss of communities, loss of life, impacts on health, and untold environmental damage to our watersheds—not to mention the pumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere—are devastating. This continuing disaster needs to be addressed like the catastrophe it is.

2) We are the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), an organization of dedicated natural resource professionals—field practitioners, firefighters, and scientists—with thousands of years of on the ground experience. Our membership lives in every state of the nation. We are dedicated to sustaining healthy National Forests and National Grasslands, the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, to provide clean water, quality outdoor recreation, wildlife and fish habitat, and carbon sequestration, and to be more resilient to catastrophic wildfire as our climate changes.

3) As some of us here on the Smokey Wire have been explaining for years, the NAFSR very clearly and succinctly states:
Small treatment areas, scattered “random acts of restoration” across the landscape, are not large enough to make a meaningful difference. Decades of field observations and peer reviewed research both document the effectiveness of strategic landscape fuel treatments and support the pressing need to do more. The cost of necessary treatments is a fraction of the wildfire damage such treatments can prevent. Today’s wildfires in overstocked forests burn so hot and on such vast acreages that reforestation becomes difficult or next to impossible in some areas. Soil damage and erosion become extreme. Watersheds which supply vital domestic, industrial, and agricultural water are damaged or destroyed.

4) This summer, America watched with great apprehension as the Caldor Fire approached South Lake Tahoe. In a community briefing, wildfire incident commander Rocky Oplinger described how active management of forestlands assisted firefighters. “When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 feet to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes,” The Los Angeles Times quoted him.

5) And in a Sacramento Bee interview in which fire researcher Scott Stephens was asked how much consensus there is among fire scientists that fuels treatments do help, he answered “I’d say at least 99%. I’ll be honest with you, it’s that strong; it’s that strong. There’s at least 99% certainty that treated areas do moderate fire behavior. You will always have the ignition potential, but the fires will be much easier to manage.” I (Steve Ellis) don’t know if it’s 99% or not, but a wildfire commander with decades of experience recently told me this figure would be at least 90%. What is important here is that there is broad agreement among professionals that properly treated landscapes do moderate fire behavior.

6) During my career (Steve Ellis), I have personally witnessed fire dropping from tree crowns to the ground when it hit a thinned forest. So have many NAFSR members. This is an issue where scientist and practitioners agree. More strategic landscape treatments are necessary to help avoid increasingly disastrous wildfires. So, the next time you read or hear someone say that thinning and prescribed fire in the forest does not work, remember that nothing can be further from the truth.

The latest multiple-use

Pop-up shops!  What is a pop-up shop?  They are defined by someone who provides them as “temporary retail spaces that sell merchandise of any kind … Pop-up shops are taking over the retail world and rethinking traditional brick-and-mortar and big-box stores…”    The National Forest Foundation apparently had to jump on this bandwagon with Busch beer.  So here you go …. ,  a pop-top pop-up shop, coming to a national forest near you.

Conservation lands in many places have been overrun by crowds attracted by social media.  This seems like it has the same potential.  It would be interesting to look at the NEPA analysis for these permits.  (Do you suppose it’s in grizzly bear habitat?)

Research: eastern forest old growth more resilient to climate change

“Analyzing large amounts of field data from 18,500 forest plots – from Minnesota to Maine, and Manitoba to Nova Scotia – the study identifies priority regions for forest climate adaption efforts.”

A study funded by the Forest Service found that older forests in eastern North America are less vulnerable to climate change than younger forests in terms of the sensitivity of carbon storage, timber volume and species richness.  From the abstract (linked to this news release):

We found the strongest association among the investigated ESB indicators (ecosystem services and biodiversity) in old forests (>170 years). These forests simultaneously support high levels of carbon storage, timber growth, and species richness. Older forests also exhibit low climate sensitivity of associations among ESB indicators as compared to younger forests. While regions with a currently low combined ESB performance benefitted from climate change, regions with a high ESB performance were particularly vulnerable to climate change. In particular, climate sensitivity was highest east and southeast of the Great Lakes, signaling potential priority areas for adaptive management. Our findings suggest that strategies aimed at enhancing the representation of older forest conditions at landscape scales will help sustain ESB in a changing world.

Some of this sounds a little contradictory (maybe someone with more expertise and/or who reads the full article could explain), and I wonder if it has any application at all to more fire-prone forests.  But it is a different way of looking at climate change adaptation that could be incorporated into forest planning.

Forest Management: “For a Warming World, A New Strategy for Protecting Watersheds”

This article was prepared by Yale Environment 360. Although its focus is primarily on protecting watersheds, most of the well validated scientific principles that Sound Forest Management is based on are clearly demonstrated in a way that easily shows the value of human intervention in our federal forests for other site/situational specific prescribed purposes as well. Here are some highlights which have been the subject of many previous posts on this site.

  1. water managers are learning that careful management and restoration of watershed ecosystems, including thinning trees and conducting prescribed burns, are important tools in coping with a hotter, drier climate.
  2. New Mexico’s forests … areas that supported 40 trees per acre in the pre-European era now were blanketed with up to a hundred times as many. This profusion of trees — as many as one per square yard — weakened all of them, and rendered them defenseless against megafires.
  3. the Las Conchas Fire … consumed nearly an acre of forest per second … and left behind nearly 100 square miles so severely burned that even seeds to regenerate the forest were destroyed …
    two months later, when a thunderstorm in the Jemez Mountains washed tons of ash and debris into the Rio Grande River, the water source for half of New Mexico’s population and for a major agricultural area. Only an inch of rain fell, but the debris flows the storm generated turned the river black and dumped ash, sediment, and tree and shrub remnants into a major reservoir, requiring a costly cleanup … a heavy rainstorm two years later generated enough sediment to entirely plug the Rio Grande
  4. In the last two decades, megafires in similarly dry and overgrown watersheds have ended up contaminating downstream water supplies in numerous areas throughout the western United States, including Phoenix; Denver; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Fort Collins, Colorado. Downstream water managers serving millions of urban residents have learned that the security of their water supplies is tied to the health of upland watersheds that may be hundreds of miles away.
  5. In the Western U.S., watershed restoration chiefly consists of two steps: thinning of trees and shrubs, and prescribed burns. In the Eastern U.S., it involves a bigger set of tools, including planting native trees, reducing the area of impervious surfaces, and slowing the speed of stormwater so that more water percolates into soil and aquifers. All these measures are designed to improve water quality.
  6. numerous pilot projects have shown the efficacy of restoration, agencies rarely have enough money to treat entire watersheds
  7. after the Las Conchas fire, residents in the Rio Grande watershed … in 2014 they launched a public-private partnership, the Rio Grande Water Fund, whose 73 contributing members include government agencies at all levels, foundations and other NGOs, local water utilities, and local businesses and residents. Together they raised enough money for a 20-year program to restore 600,000 forest acres — enough to support the resilience of the entire central and northern New Mexico portion of the Rio Grande watershed. They have already restored 108,000 acres, and are racing to complete the job before another megafire occurs.
  8. The Rio Grande Water Fund’s public-private partnership model has become official federal policy. Last August, the U.S. Forest Service published a landmark report called “Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes” that outlined the agency’s intention to convene watershed stakeholders of all kinds to plan and fund watershed restoration. “Because fire crosses back and forth across land ownership boundaries, the risk is shared,” the report said. “Accordingly, land managers cannot achieve the fire-related outcomes people want… without shared stewardship of the wildland fire environment.”
  • The benefits of watershed restoration extend far beyond water security. Most obviously, healthy forests deter megafires. Laura McCarthy, the Rio Grande Water Fund’s executive director, says that in three instances since restoration work began in New Mexico, wildfires that ran up against restored zones immediately died down. Healthy forests can tolerate low-intensity fires: they possess diverse understories of grasses, sedges, and forbs and rich, microbe-laden soil, all of which supports wildlife, from insects to mammals. Watershed restoration can double the amount of carbon stored in the soil, which means that it’s a vital tool in fighting climate change. And watershed restoration creates jobs: In the case of the Rio Grande Water Fund, many of those jobs go to youths in traditional Hispanic and Native American communities where unemployment rates are 30 percent or higher.
  • In some regions, forest restoration even increases water supplies. Roger Bales, a hydrologist at the University of California, Merced, has shown that because watershed restoration requires the removal of vast numbers of young trees, loss of water into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration in those trees is eliminated. The water instead flows downward, into the soil, often on its way to the watershed’s rivers and reservoirs. Bales’ experiments in California’s Sierra Nevada show that restoration can increase water supplies in downstream reservoirs by 9 to 16 percent. That makes restoration a more cost effective (and vastly less destructive) water supply method in California than building dams. Restoration is also cheaper than fighting the megafires that are otherwise inevitable in the overgrown forests: last year’s Camp Fire in northern California alone caused $11 billion to $13 billion in damage.
  • unless it is followed by prescribed burns, undesirable trees and shrubs grow back. In that case, said Don Falk, a leading fire researcher at the University of Arizona, “You’re either committed to a perpetual Sisyphean cycle of thinning” every 10 or 15 years “or you’ve got to let fire back into the system.” Fire is an integral part of the functioning of many ecosystems: Blazes of less-than-megafire scale germinate seeds, keep native species in balance while warding off invasive species, and stimulate microbial activity that produces soil nutrients.

Maybe they should just sell this national forest land?

Steve Sanders addressed the board on the issue of the landfill nearing capacity. Sanders stated the landfill is expected to meet capacity sometime in the summer 2018. The plan for expansion has been on the books for a number of years. The expansion will cap in 5-7 years and then will require Gila County to have a new site to continue to collect municipal solid waste to dispose of for the northern part of the county. They have already started discussions with the Forest Service to acquire land around the Buckhead Mesa Landfill as it’s on a special use permit from the Tonto National Forest.

When someone argues that the Forest Service isn’t complying with the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act because a particular use excludes others, show them this example.  I suppose you could camp here … or how about a shooting range?

What is Beyond the “Fog of War”?

There are scary and uncertain times ahead for our forests. There is just too much “Fog of War” going on for the public to sort out and fact-check for themselves. Even the ‘fact-checkers’ should be suspect, until proven reliable and bias-free. The rise of ‘fake news’ has blurred multiple lines, and many people, even in mass media, fall for the hoaxes, satire or misinformation. (Example: An article appeared on the Grist website, showing concern about a recall of “Dog Condoms”, presenting the link to www.dogcondoms.com )

When the locals pay for national forest fuel reduction …

Everybody wins?

“So were Flagstaff officials prescient when they proposed what, at the time, was one of the first municipal partnerships with a national forest to have lands outside city boundaries thinned at city expense?”

“Hindsight is 20-20, but it sure looks that way to us. Armed with a $10 million budget, the Forest Service immediately went to work on an environmental study that mapped the most fireprone timber stands as well as nests of endangered Mexican spotted owls.  Steep slopes most prone to erosion were pegged for less-harmful cable logging, and some stands of old-growth ponderosas were declared off limits. Using collaborative tactics learned from 4FRI, the draft EIS containing a thinning plan was ready in near-record time and drew no lawsuits that would cause delay.”

Could that be because there’s no revenue or profit motive driving more destructive logging practices?

The response of the forest to drought

This post provides some on the ground research and consistent but separate modeling results that demonstrate the importance of stand density in coping with climate change and therefore the importance of sustainable forest management. Hopefully this will change some minds on the importance of strategically managing density.

A) The response of the forest to drought: the role of stand density and species diversity This article is an attempt to quantify previously established science.

1) “Droughts affect wood formation through the reduction in photosynthetic rates due to stomatal closure, reducing the amount of carbohydrates available for building new cells.”

2) “used tree-ring data from long-term forest plots of two pine species, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and red pine (Pinus resinosa). The experiments were distributed in different geographical areas in the USA and they covered a large aridity gradient. They quantified growth responses at the population level to express both resistance and resilience to drought in relation to the relative tree population density, finding out that reducing densities would enhance both growth responses to drought. Trees growing in denser populations were more negatively impacted by drought and this has been shown in all three biogeographical areas.”
NOTE from “Climate Change Research Focuses on Great Lakes Forests”: “ASCC is monitoring the growth, health and survival rates of the trees in these forests, and focusing on three key qualities: resistance, resilience and transition. Resistance measures a species’ ability to remain stable and productive in a drought situation, resilience is a tree’s ability to return to normal productivity after experiencing an environmental change and transition refers to circumstances that encourage ecosystems to adapt to changing conditions.”

3) “This study confirms once more that the vulnerability of monospecific coniferous forests to increasing drought can be reduced through thinning interventions, which represent a viable adaptation strategy under climate change.”

4) “investigated the drought response of 16 individual tree species in different regions of Europe and evaluated if this was related to species diversity and stand density. Based on previous findings indicating that combining species with complementary characteristics is more important than simply increasing species diversity to cope with drought, their results indicate that species growing in a mixture are not always less water stressed than those growing in monoculture.”
See also: a) “Species composition determines resistance to drought in dry forests of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence forest region of central Ontario” b) “SPECIES RICHNESS AND STAND STABILITY IN CONIFER FORESTS OF THE SIERRA NEVADA” c) “Functional diversity enhances silver fir growth resilience to an extreme drought”

5) “Investigating these effects at the level of species identity (i.e., different combinations of species) is more advisable than doing it at the level of species richness (i.e., abundance of species), because different mixtures respond differently depending on the region. If we consider that different provenances of the same species can show different adaptation strategies to cope with drought, the situation may be even more complex.”

B) Ecosystem services, mountain forests and climate change
Note: This modeling effort passes the #1 smell test in that it agrees with already established scientific principles while adding quantitative measures that support the previously known trend but shouldn’t be taken as absolutes.

1) “it is estimated that about half of the global human population depends – directly or indirectly – on services delivered by mountain forests. It is therefore essential to assess whether multiple ecosystem services can be provided to human societies in the future. Given that climate is changing fast, the consideration of climate change in scientific assessments is a must! Let’s not forget that European forests are managed since centuries (check out this nice book about the history of European forests). Thus, changes in management regimes must be considered as well.”

2) “in the Iberian Mountains their simulation results indicate that forest management, rather than climate change, is responsible for a reduction in carbon storage and biodiversity. On the contrary, in Western Alps changes in climatic regimes could induces large alterations in the supply of several ecosystem services, particularly under the most pessimistic future climate scenarios. In other areas (e.g., in the Slovenian Dinaric Mountains) climate change would strongly affect ecosystem services, albeit differently depending on elevation and stand conditions.”

3) “This confirms that management is a strong driver of forest dynamics in European mountains, and it can highly modify the future provision of ecosystem services (i.e., more than the direct effects of climate change!).”