Forest Service plan sabotages ferret recovery on Thunder Basin National Grassland

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Here’s a press release from Western Watersheds Project about the Forest Service’s plans to eliminate a Black-Footed Ferret Recovery management area of over 50,000 acres on Wyoming’s Thunder Basin National Grassland via a Forest Plan amendment.

Yesterday, Jon Haber shared this account of the Coconino National Forest in Arizona amending a Forest Plan, which was just revised in 2018, to facilitate construction of a powerline.

That got me wondering: Can folks think of many examples where the U.S. Forest Service has amended a Forest Plan to strengthen protections for wildlife, clean water, old-growth forests, soils or biodiversity? If so, please do share these examples. Regardless, my gut feeling is that the number of times the Forest Service has amended a Forest Plan to weaken protections for wildlife, clean water, old-growth forests, soils or biodiversity would far outnumber them.

Here’s that Western Watersheds Project press release:

LARAMIE, Wyo. – Western Watersheds Project submitted formal comments today excoriating a Forest Service proposal to eliminate a Black-Footed Ferret Recovery management area of over 50,000 acres on Wyoming’s Thunder Basin National Grassland. The Forest Service’s plan amendment increases the poisoning and shooting of native prairie dogs, upon which ferrets depend for their survival, an action driven by livestock lobby concerns that prairie dogs compete for vegetation with privately-owned cattle on these public lands.

“The Thunder Basin is one of the rare large expanses of public land where black-footed ferrets could be reintroduced on the High Plains,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and Executive Director with Western Watersheds Project. “The Forest Service has an obligation to recover both prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets to their natural and healthy populations here, irrespective of livestock industry profits.”

The black-tailed prairie dog is designated as a Sensitive Species by the Forest Service. Ecologically, it is considered a “keystone species” holding grasslands ecosystems together, and it is critical to the survival of many other rare species of wildlife, from burrowing owls to swift foxes to mountain plovers. According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, black-tailed prairie dogs are down to one-one-hundredth of one percent of their original occupied habitat in Wyoming.

The original Grasslands Plan, completed in 2002, limited prairie dog poisoning to areas immediately adjacent to homes and cemeteries, and protected prairie dogs from sport shooting in the Black-footed Ferret Recovery zone. Thunder Basin ranchers, dissatisfied with the limitations governing prairie dog killing on public lands, pressed for weaker protections and more loopholes, and succeeded in dominating a collaborative process that wound up expanding prairie dog poisoning to Forest Service lands along private land boundaries. The new plan amendment expands poisoning and recreational shooting further still.

“Ranchers shouldn’t be able to rent public lands for private livestock grazing if they can’t coexist with the native wildlife, prairie dogs included,” said Molvar. “The idea that a federal agency wants to authorize the poisoning native wildlife in order to keep them off neighboring private lands – where they are also native – effectively imprisons wildlife on public lands and blocks them from repopulating their original habitats elsewhere.”

The Thunder Basin National Grassland encompasses lands that are the traditional lands of the Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota peoples.

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Trump’s NEPA Proposal

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The Washington Post has an article on this: “Trump proposes change to environmental rules to speed up highway projects, pipelines and more.” The proposal is here.

The proposed rules would narrow the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to assess the impact of a major project before a spade of dirt is turned and to include the public in the process.
…
The proposed regulations would redefine what constitutes a “major federal action” to exclude privately financed projects that have minimal government funding or involvement.

That interpretation of the law would make it much easier to build most pipelines, which have become controversial as activists have sought to block projects that make it easier to extract, transport or burn fossil fuels linked to climate change.
…
Other aspects of the proposal would set deadlines and page limits for environmental reviews, so that, with rare exceptions, agencies would have to finish their most exhaustive reviews within two years.

 

Welcome to the Climate Sciences Voyage of Discovery! I. Starting with Some Epistemology

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Welcome to the Climate Sciences Voyage of Discovery! This will be a weekly feature of The Smokey Wire for the foreseeable future.

I am the veteran of over 30 years of following the climate sciences and their ins and outs. This series will specifically address epistemology (how do you know what you know?), history of science, and sociology of science. That is, we will be taking several steps back from the table of climate science as it is today to investigate how those plates got to the table.

One thing I’ve noticed in online discussions is that people, including scientists, are extraordinarily mean to each other by TSW standards. So I’m going to make this place safe for folks to ask questions or make comments by having a higher level of moderation. Please feel free to invite non-TSW friends along for the Voyage.

Today we’ll start at the very beginning with some epistemology, in this write-up from New Scientist.

This weakness becomes greater as we extend the scientific method into more complex realms with more variables and so more uncertainty, such as social science or climate change. Science progresses legitimately through speculation and hypothesising, but until these speculations are tested by experiment, for a stickler any “knowledge” that emerges from them must strictly be labelled as provisional.

It is a weakness (or strength, depending on your point of view) exploited with gusto by climate-change sceptics, among others. But it points to a blunt truth: if scientific knowledge feels special to you, you are in its in-group. As we grow up, we absorb beliefs from our cultural environment. For some that means accepting scientific knowledge; for others it means “revealed” knowledge, from the Bible, say.

And here’s the thing. For all the bluster about “the evidence”, if you are a scientific believer you too are taking almost all of it on trust. “In principle everybody should be able to replicate scientific results given time, money and training,” says Brigitte Nerlich at the University of Nottingham, UK. “But not everyone has a Large Hadron Collider or a climate-modelling computer.” You are taking someone’s word for it. Like other forms of knowledge, most of science comes down to trusting the source.

Not special, then? Perhaps – except that science also provides mechanisms to justify trust in the knowledge it generates. “Authority in science is earned – at least, when a scientific community is functioning well – by success at predicting, and more generally at analysing, empirical phenomena,” says philosopher Edward Hall of Harvard University. Science’s conclusions are accepted when they fit with our experience of the physical world, and are discarded when they cease to. That makes trust in science a justified true belief – and knowledge that true science generates a cut above the rest. Just don’t take my word for it.

There are three questions in this article that we examine at each stop (topic area) on the rest of the Voyage..

(1) Are the institutions and individuals in different parts of the climate sciences worthy of that trust? We’ll go ahead and look at some scientist and institution behavior.

(2) Many climate studies predict phenomena in the future, but can’t have empirical testing of those predictions. To what extent are those actually “science” in the traditional sense of being tested against empirical phenomena? Is a series of linked assumptions, on its own, “science”? If they are not “science” what are they, and how much of the authority, if any, should they have?

(3) “Science’s conclusions are accepted when they fit with our experience of the physical world, and are discarded when they cease to.” Whose experience? That subdiscipline of the scientific community? Other disciplines? Practitioners (if they exist in a specific science world, say doctors for medical sciences)? The public? At some point, the interpersonal dynamics of the subdiscipline may say “we must be right” and may question the legitimacy of others- others who indeed have experience in the physical world. Those with experience may say that the subdiscipline is more interested in reinforcing their authority and accumulating grant funding, and can’t be objective. IMHO the practitioner/researcher discussion is the most productive for knowledge production, but the occurrence of opportunities for this interaction are highly uneven across the climate sciences.

Failed planning for power lines on the Coconino

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(Modoc National Forest photo)

The Coconino National Forest Plan was revised in 2018.  They have just announced that a proposed powerline requires a forest plan amendment because, “The proposed power line and associated roads would not comply with the following forest plan guidance after all reasonable stipulations to minimize impacts are applied: ‘Management activities and permitted uses should be designed and implemented to maintain or move toward the desired SIOs.'” “SIOs” are “Scenic Integrity Objectives, which are forest plan components.  It also appears to conflict with several plan guidelines for special uses (though the letter doesn’t directly acknowledge that).  Nobody saw this coming during the recent plan revision?  Did the forest plan include things that really weren’t that important?  (Scenery doesn’t seem to often rise to the level of litigation.)  Is this just more “energy dominance” from the Trump administration?  The scoping letter doesn’t attempt to answer these kinds of questions.

This article includes a link to the scoping documents.  From the map, it looks like the power lines are needed as a shortcut, and is often the case, conservation lands are the easiest target.  All of the action alternatives would violate the forest plan.  A compliant alternative seems like an obvious omission.  (And there is a requirement for special use permits that locations off of the national forest be not feasible.)  While the Forest discusses burying  the line, it’s not clear that they are considering an alternative that would bury all of it in areas where it is not consistent with the scenery objectives, or whether doing so would meet them.  Of course we can’t actually tell exactly where it would violate those objectives because the scoping letter doesn’t distinguish between the areas where the objectives are “high” or “moderate,” but maybe it’s the entire route.  While the amendment would be “project specific,” meaning it wouldn’t affect future projects, does that make any sense if the landscape would no longer meet the objectives in the forest plan?  ( Some of the scenery management science is not intuitive to me.)  At least they included the amendment in scoping for the project (some have popped that out at the last minute).

This summary dismissal of the forest plan unfortunately suggests a lack of respect given to forest plans and the effort put into them.  I don’t know anything about the scenery here, or who looks at it, but if it was important enough to put into a forest plan a couple of years ago, it seems like it should be important enough to take a little more seriously now.

Grand Teton Park Killing “Invasive” Goats to Protect Bighorn Sheep

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Note this photo is of the sheep, not goats.
Since we have gotten on the topic of bighorn sheep protection...here is a link to an AP story about shooting mountain goats in Grand Teton National Park for bighorn protection.

There are two interesting things about this.. first, that species are “invasive” if they expand their ranges since when (pre-European settlement? Do we actually know what their ranges were then? When do we think like this? What about these cutthroat trout.. are they “invasive”- perhaps not because they didn’t get their on their own power?

The second interesting thing is that non-motorized recreation is apparently also not good for bighorns in this case:

The bighorn sheep herd, by contrast, is considered fragile. They have been pushed out of some of their best habitat by backcountry skiing activity, and their existence is threatened by potential disease transmission by the mountain goats.

Does anyone know if the Park is reducing or eliminating backcountry skiing to protect bighorns?

This Denver news story says that

The Grand Teton National Park Foundation called its mountain goats “perhaps the biggest ecological threat to the area in modern history” to the park in 2014.

but the link didn’t work so I couldn’t check.

Here are some local details from the Idaho State Journal:

Because shotguns will be blasting from helicopters to kill mountain goats in Grand Teton National Park during the coming week, a temporary area closure for the public is being implemented in the central part of the park.

The closure is slated for Sunday through Jan. 12 and is bounded on the south by the South, Middle, Grand Teton, Mount Owen and Teewinot Mountain peaks; on the west by the park boundary; on the east by the western shores of Jackson, Leigh, String and Jenny lakes; and on the north by Rolling Thunder Mountain and Eagle Rest peaks.

“No public access will be allowed in the area during this time,” the park said in a news release. “Signs will be posted at main access locations.”

Wolf Reintroduction Story in Colorado Springs Gazette by Liz Forster

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This image of what appears to be a radio-collared wolf was sent to Colorado Parks and Wildlife from a member of the public near Colorado State Forest State Park in July 2019. (Photo: CPW)

The Wolf Reintroduction to Colorado initiative just got enough signatures for the ballot, which reminded me that I never had a chance to post this excellent (IMHO) article by Liz Forster, formerly of the Colorado Springs Gazette and currently a law student at University of Montana. While there tend to be controversies about wolves, this controversy seems to be about whether the State of Colorado lets them come in “naturally” or develops a program to reintroduce them.

Here is my earlier post:

I thought Liz Forster did a great job on this article on reintroducing wolves to Colorado in terms of helping us understand both, or really, many sides. What is most interesting to me is the idea that species need to be reintroduced and how this is portrayed as a scientific idea, rather than a value or preference.

The wolves’ re-establishment in Colorado’s wilderness — ideally, say backers, 100 to 200 within 10 years — would trigger a ripple of benefits among wildlife, plants and other organisms and restore ecosystemic balance, the Wolf Action Fund argues.

“It’s important that we reunite the path of wolf movement from [the] north to south [borders] because with movement you have integration, which is good for ecological health,” said Rick Ridder, the campaign’s spokesman. “It all ties into: let’s keep Colorado wild, let’s keep our wilderness wild and let’s try to keep what we love about Colorado and our mountains for our children and grandchildren.”

The concept of “ecosystemic balance” is questionable, as we’ve discussed before, not least in Botkin’s book Discordant Harmonies. I’m not sure exactly what “integration” or “ecological health” means in that context. I can see that linking the populations from Canada to Mexico could provide for more gene exchange, except that isn’t the Mexican Gray Wolf considered to be subspecies, so it it “good” for them to mate with other gray wolves, or “bad”?. But if it’s good because of gene exchange leading to more diversity, couldn’t we do that now (captive breeding?). But would the subspecies still be “endangered” then and have the same legal hooks for protection? And of course, having more predators may be great unless you happen to be a member of a species that gets predated upon (or have companion animals/livestock that get predated upon), or you happen to be a species that has benefited from more prey. Remember niche theory? There are two ideas that may be important here: 1) the idea that there is some kind of interest of wholeness above that of individual species, or 2) the past is best. Both ideas are interesting to contemplate, but neither actually is a scientific idea. In fact, looking at the past tells us that plants, animals, and a variety of other organisms are constantly changing, moving, and so on- ending up in a variety of unpredictable assemblages over time. And humans have changed both the environment and the movement of species over time.

And logically, if the wolf has been absent for 70 years, are we really “keeping what we love” or trying to duplicate the past we don’t actually remember? Time’s arrow only goes one way, so is that possible? Should we equally get rid of dams and other water infrastructure Colorado rivers to go back to the past? Or kick people out of recreating or other activities? As with all other “let’s go back” interventions, clearly this is a decision where there would be species, and people, winners and losers. There’s not a “science” answer.

Here’s some more interesting stuff from her article:

A study published by the University of Wyoming in April showed that the ubiquity with which the promise of the Yellowstone example was applied to other places might not have as much merit as proponents say. The trophic cascades associated with the reintroduction of an apex predator sometimes happened in the studies they reviewed, sometimes it didn’t.

“We need more studies,” said Jesse Alston, the paper’s lead researcher, in Science Daily. “More tests of this ‘assumption of reciprocity,’ as we call it — particularly via rigorous experimental studies — would be really helpful. This is hard data to get, but we really do need it before we can credibly claim that large carnivores restore ecosystems. They might not.”

A 2018 study by Mark Boyce of the University of Alberta also emphasized the mixed results of wolf reintroduction in areas with significant human presence versus a protected space like Yellowstone.

I would tend to agree with Hemming of RMEF

A ballot initiative, Henning added, also circumvents the wildlife management protocols put in place that require a commission to review the scientific viability of the plan, a public review process and other checks and balances.

“My fear is that it would be rushed,” he said. “The slow, natural immigration of those animals can be softer so that the elk and people can adjust, and we can prepare a management plan for them.”

But Weber says we need to be in more of a hurry.

Natural migration could take years, most likely decades, though, Weber said, and the ecosystem can’t wait that long.

“Coloradans need to go to places where the killing of wolves has led to the destruction of the ecosystem, where the vegetation is destroyed,” Weber said. “Then we can get Coloradans to stand proud and say, ‘We won’t do the same thing.’ ”

I guess I haven’t seen any “destroyed ecosystems” or “destroyed vegetation” caused by lack of wolves, myself, and so I don’t quite understand the urgency.

How Tribal Experts Are Shaping the Federal Government’s Wildfire Strategy

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An NPR podcast:

How Tribal Experts Are Shaping the Federal Government’s Wildfire Strategy

But going forward, one solution supported by indigenous communities in Australia and here in the United States involves setting fires intentionally. 

Today, scientists and the United States Forest Service largely agree with tribal members that intentionally burning sections of forests is an important way to protect against wildfires. But many tribal experts say that the scale of these prescribed fires still need to be dramatically increased going forward.

Also, this site has lots of info on fire ecology and management in Australia:

Largely as a result of European misunderstanding and fear of fire, fire suppression rapidly became the dominant paradigm in fire management; in most areas there was a large shift away from traditional burning practices.

In northern Australia, the disruption of traditional burning practices means that many areas (e.g. the Top End) are now prone to extensive wildfires that sweep through the country late in the dry season.

Sound familiar?

 

Peter Williams on The Challenges of “Getting It Right” in Land Management Decisions

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Christmas readings often involve seeking peace (e.g., lions lying down with lambs, and other non-biological ideas). We tend not to use that kind of language so much in resolving or managing environmental conflicts. Still, I can think of no one better to start off 2020 than with a thoughtful (as usual!) piece by Peter Williams on “getting it right.” Here it is:

Recently, The Smokey Wire has had several really interesting posts or comments that raise the question of what we mean by “getting it right” when it comes to Forest planning and other land management decisions including project plans. Tim Coleman and Russ Vaagen, among others, talked about the Colville National Forest. They provide a perfect example of how different people can see “right” differently. I had good experiences working with both of them about a decade ago on various local USFS planning efforts, so I appreciate their insights regarding the County Commissioners, local industry, USFS, and local residents [LINK].

Sharon challenged a few of us to think about this question of getting it right, with Tony Erba offering the first take a few weeks ago [LINK]. The question we were asked was about “getting it right” when it comes to land management decisions and what role can USFS and stakeholders play in that. I’m going to offer two main thoughts: (1) it’s worth taking a step back to consider the question and (2) what we mean by the “it” in “getting it right” is also worth careful consideration.

The question about “getting it right” seems to go to the idea of a “right” answer, as opposed to a “good” answer, and this affects our search pattern, meaning it affects what we look for. From a decision-making perspective, if we search for a right answer, we often think in terms of a single best answer being the ultimate right one. For this reason, my first thought is to take a step back, to reframe the question.

Let me offer an example, overstating it to make a point. Folks searching for a right answer may disagree about what is the right answer, but they all agree there is one and they can find it. Often, they even begin their search already knowing what they mean by a right answer, at least in some significant ways often based on their technical training or beliefs about how the world works. Their search pattern is defined by agreement that there is a right answer and, more powerfully, by their disagreements regarding whether and when they have found the answer itself. These disagreements tend to be or become counterproductive if not destructive because if you aren’t right, you must be wrong.

In contrast, consider what searching for a “good” answer can mean. Instead of looking for the single right answer, a search for a good answer looks for a broader set of plausible, viable answers. Also, consider that looking for a good answer as a group or as a community often allows room for constructive disagreement because it begins with developing some shared understanding of what different folks might mean by “good” with regards to addressing or resolving the local, immediate issue.

This constructive disagreement, handled well, can enlarge the edges of the envelope within which is that set of good answers. And, within that set, more folks can see more of their interests, which is a really different result that you get from the right-wrong frame.

So, my first point is that searching for a right answer and searching for a good answer are different in truly meaningful ways. If you want to explore this idea, read “The Unbounded Mind” by Mitroff and Linstone (1993). Yes, one could quibble about the words or argue that I’m just setting up a conceptual stalking horse, but I hope the point is still useful for discussion.

My second point is that whether a land management decision is right sometimes depends on whether you look at it in the near-term, as opposed to from a longer-term perspective, as well as whether you look at it from a technical perspective, a legal perspective, or a community perspective.

A different way of looking at the idea of “rightness”—somewhat similar to the idea of looking for a good answer—might be that a land management decision is right when it is appropriate given what is known about the issue, the resources available to address the issue, and the willingness to live with the decision.

There’s an interesting literature about “appropriateness-based decision making” as opposed to “traditional rational planning.” The former tends to focus on trying to understand the situation, including how the group or participants see themselves and what they see as an appropriate process. Traditional rational planning, in contrast, tends to define rightness in terms of consequences understood through technical lenses, like the ubiquitous “Effects Analyses” so familiar as part of a NEPA process. For a really readable look at this, check out March’s “A Primer on Decision Making” (1994).

As an aside, an effects analysis would still occur as part of a NEPA process framed by “appropriateness,” but it would look different because more attention to the situation, community, and process would happen up front, up-stream of what we might call the formal NEPA process. The main take-away I would offer here is that what most of us would call the traditional NEPA process is not the only way to comply with the NEPA Act and CEQ regulations, but that’s a whole different discussion, one that Jon Haber might have particularly useful insights to add.

Coming back to this question of “rightness” for a land management decision, I’m going to suggest that a particularly useful way to think about this is to focus on what happens the day AFTER the decision. Let’s assume we’re thinking about rightness as more like a set of good options (point #1) that are appropriate for the circumstances and participants (point #2). What’s right might come down to whether, once the decision is made, the participants share a general willingness to live with the decision and whether many will actually support implementation, perhaps helping make it happen or helping assess whether desired outcomes occur and undesired ones do not.

The reason I suggest this approach is it seems more likely to avoid the trap that Tony Erba alluded to, where, after a bunch of meetings that seem to be going in a worthy direction, folks retreat to their starting positions and the USFS—or whoever—is left holding the proverbial bag. That’s no good for anyone who cares about public lands or collaborative conservation.

Litigation updates that didn’t make the NFS litigation weekly

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(Update.)  The Custer Gallatin National Forest has done the additional work required after it lost this lawsuit (which we were discussing in 2012), and is seeking to lift the injunction, but plaintiffs still think effects on lynx habitat are a problem.

(Update and NOI.)  Plaintiffs who won the Pilgrim Project case on the Kootenai National Forest have issued over 100 notices of intent to sue on other projects on the Kootenai, Idaho Panhandle, and Lolo national forests where ineffective road closures may affect grizzly bears.  The Forest Service has appealed the Pilgrim case, but has also reinitiated ESA consultation on 37 projects.

(Update.)  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard an appeal from two environmental groups that have sued to stop the project to thin/log the insect-infested forest along the Lostine River Road.  This 2017 case was discussed here.

  • Sage grouse

(Update.)  The government and defendant intervenors have appealed to the 9th Circuit the district court’s injunction of the 2019 sage grouse amendments to BLM and Forest Service plans.  This Western Watersheds case was discussed most recently here.  Also, as a result of that district court decision, another sage grouse case filed by ranchers against the 2015 sage grouse amendments is proceeding, and environmental groups are seeking to intervene.

(No objection!)  The Forest prepared a forest-wide EIS for removal of juniper to achieve a desired (historic) distribution of juniper and aspen.  The Grand Canyon Trust said it wasn’t much different from what they would like to see.  Chaining is allowed by the decision – compare to our discussion of that here.

 

Lost trees hugely overrated as environmental threat, study finds

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“Previous estimates argued that about 27 percent of manmade net carbon emissions were from deforestation whereas the new research estimates that the correct number is just 7 percent.”

Press release from scientists at Yale and Ohio State is below….

The study is open access.

 

Nov 04, 2019

Lost trees hugely overrated as environmental threat, study finds

Carbon emissions from deforestation much smaller than previously thought, economists say

Cutting down trees inevitably leads to more carbon in the environment, but deforestation’s contributions to climate change are vastly overestimated, according to a new study.

Deforestation for timber and farmland is responsible for about 92 billion tons of carbon emissions into the environment since 1900, found a study led by researchers at The Ohio State University and Yale University.

“Our estimate is about a fifth of what was found in previous work showing that deforestation has contributed 484 billion tons of carbon – a third of all manmade emissions – since 1900,” said Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental and resource economics at Ohio State.

He said that widely accepted estimate didn’t take into account the planting of new trees and other forest management techniques that lessen the environmental burden. The model used in this study did take those factors into account, which made a significant difference considering the intensive forest management happening in many parts of the world and the less-intensive, but not inconsequential, management that is happening elsewhere.The study appears today (Nov. 4, 2019) in the Journal of Forest Economics.

“There was a significant shift toward treating forests as a renewable, rather than nonrenewable, resource in the last century, and we estimate that those reforestation and forest management efforts have led to a far smaller carbon burden on the environment,” Sohngen said, adding that the previous estimate was based on trees’ natural regrowth without any human intervention.

“Manmade land use and land-use change has had a relatively small effect on carbon emissions compared to the almost 1,300 billion tons of industrial carbon emissions during the same time period.”

Previous estimates argued that about 27 percent of manmade net carbon emissions were from deforestation whereas the new research estimates that the correct number is just 7 percent.

“Previous estimates overestimated net emissions because they did not take account of the planting and management of global forests over the last 70 years that was undertaken to build a renewable timber forest,” said study co-author Robert Mendelsohn of Yale.

“This forest renewal was a market response to the expectation that old-growth timber was going to run out by the 1990s. Companies started planting and managing forests in the 1950s to fill this gap, and the timber industry quietly switched from being a nonrenewable mining industry to a renewable forest-crop industry.”

The new study results suggest that efforts to decrease carbon emissions should focus largely on industry. Trends over the last 10 to 15 years toward less harvesting of mature forests and tree removal for agriculture are likely to continue into the future, Sohngen said.

But that doesn’t mean that environmental protection work should ignore forests, he said.

On the contrary, trees may have quite a large role in protecting against climate change if governments worldwide provide incentives that lead to more careful forest management worldwide, Sohngen said.

Forest management includes planting trees, selecting varieties, adjusting the stocking rates to optimize growth, thinning trees, careful fertilization practices, irrigation and drainage management and other approaches that enhance forest growth.

“Forestry and land use are blamed for being an enormous source of climate change, but they’re not an enormous source. The energy sector is an enormous source, and that’s where we should focus our attention – that and looking for ways to maximize our forests’ role in protecting the environment,” Sohngen said.

Mendelsohn said that the forest could be critical in efforts to solve climate change.

“It is possible to manage the world’s forests to store more carbon than they currently do. Some of this can be stored in near-permanent tropical forests that are simply not cut at all and some can be stored in managed forests,” he said.

“In the long run, forests could also be tapped as a source of bioenergy. If they are burned along with carbon capture and storage, forests can effectively suck carbon out of the atmosphere and help the world reach lower long-run temperature targets.”