Photos: trees © Randy Beacham; carbon towers © Michael Vanden Berg
Scientists who track the carbon cycles of forests used to occupy an obscure part of the universe. In a way, they still do. These are men—and a few women—who measure, and measure again, how much carbon is contained in old trees versus how much carbon is given off by rotting logs. They estimate how much carbon is released during a wildfire, and they calculate how much carbon dioxide younger, faster-growing trees absorb from the atmosphere.
This is accountant-type work. Yet, in a world increasingly concerned about global warming, it’s work that could draw carbon-accounting scientists onto the public stage and make the U.S. Forest Service, given its broad swath of forests, a major player in the emerging debate about climate change policy.
“We have a lot of PhDs who have been studying carbon and climate change for more than twenty years, and now their ships have come in,” says Trey Schillie, ecosystem services specialist for the Forest Service in Washington, D.C. “Thirteen Forest Service scientists were recently recognized for their work by receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The issue is prime-time.”
Being in the spotlight doesn’t come easy for all. “Some of us are kind of amused and a little bit nervous that people are suddenly paying attention,” says researcher Mark Nechodom, of the Pacific Southwest Research Station.
What he and other forest ecologists have long understood is that trees can, and do, store huge amounts of carbon. That’s one reason for the concern in recent decades about loss of forests, particularly in the tropics. Deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of the carbon—which, when bonded with oxygen, becomes carbon dioxide—in the atmosphere. But the vexing proposition now being explored is whether, given this worry about the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, forests should be valued monetarily for their ability to absorb and store carbon, a process called sequestration.
Trees have always been valued as a source of building materials and heating fuel. More recently, forests have been given value—if less directly—as places of refuge and recreation. But in the aftermath of the Kyoto Treaty, a market for carbon reduction has emerged. In Europe, a cap-and-trade system created a market that determines the financial value of carbon sequestration efforts, and some people are wondering if this offers yet another way to value forests.
Because the United States did not sign the Kyoto Treaty, the market for carbon-reduction efforts here is entirely voluntary and, as it relates to forests, very small. Still, markets are growing. The most prominent is the Chicago Climate Exchange, whose 200 members include mostly large companies such as DuPont and Ford, as well as the Aspen Skiing Co. and the State of New Mexico. The group was formed several years ago to help match buyers and sellers of carbon reduction efforts. This reduction is a commodity, somewhat like pork bellies, if infinitely more difficult to measure. The common denominator is a carbon credit, which is defined as one metric ton (1.1 short tons) of carbon dioxide. The going price is $2 per ton. Hence, an action to avoid a ton of carbon emissions, such as somebody switching from coal-sourced electricity to wind power, is worth that much in an offset to another firm, such as a manufacturer that hasn’t figured out how to reduce its own emissions of carbon dioxide.
Several regional efforts have also appeared: Georgia has a carbon sequestration registry, and several northeastern states have banded together to create the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It goes into effect in 2009 and will recognize afforestation, or tree-planting, on formerly forested areas. Most notable of all is the California Climate Action Registry, which offers the most sophisticated model for what could become a federal program.
If carbon reduction efforts aren’t yet a front-burner issue, they’ve at least made their way to the stove. The leading presidential candidates have addressed climate change, and many have endorsed a cap-and-trade system of limitations on carbon that would, in effect, quantify the value of projects that reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Economists say a carbon tax would be more effective, but concede that politically it could be impossible to adopt.
Even environmental groups aren’t sure how the carbon-sequestering ability of national forests can, or should, be meshed with a market economy for carbon reduction. “It’s too important, and there’s too much controversy, for us to move forward on this without having this conversation,” says Greg Aplet, a Denver-based senior forest scientist with The Wilderness Society.
The debate “seems to cleave between the ecologists, who think it’s unrealistic and impossible, and the economists, who think it should work,” Aplet says of the group’s internal discussions. One fear is that “carbon sequestration could be the new dominant use of the forest, without a real strong understanding of the implications of that. Other people see this as a potential, legitimate twenty-first- century role of the national forests, with benefits for natural forest ecosystems as well.”
More skeptical is Kassie Siegel, climate and air program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s worth considering, but I get very nervous when I hear about national forests, logging and carbon credits,” she says. “The national forests should be managed for biodiversity and for recreation and for the public interest, and I don’t really see that we need to be selling carbon credits on public lands.”
GHOST-TOWN FOREST
For all the conference-room chatter, the carbon market has had few on-the-ground applications. One potential site is in Colorado, where the foothills southwest of Denver have the tired, vacant look of a ghost town. The trees—those that remain standing on the 44,000 acres that burned in June 2002—are blackened and leafless. At the site of the Hayman Fire, the state’s largest wildfire in recorded history, the ground is barren, with nary a trace of ponderosa pine seedlings. Unlike lodgepole pines, which regenerate quickly after a fire, ponderosa pine seeds are not able to germinate in the wake of a ground-scorching fire like the Hayman.
What if a tree-planting effort were to be nudged by work paid for, at least in part, by one of these voluntary carbon reduction markets? This is the question that Mike Ryan, a forest ecologist with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, set out to answer. That he even was assigned the task reveals a shift within the agency. If the role of forests in sequestering carbon has long been understood, it’s only in the last decade or two that the Forest Service has started thinking about its role in the global carbon cycle, and just in the past few years has the agency begun discussing it seriously at the national level.
But there’s also the budget cycle to consider. The Forest Service has seen declining budgets for many years. The massive timber sale receipts of previous decades are gone. “We’re looking for creative ways to get things done and trying to get funds so that the forests can be managed properly,” Ryan says.
An electrical utility that owns a portion of a coal-burning power plant east of Denver paid for Ryan’s study. His task was to explore how carbon credits could pay for the planting of pine seedlings in the soils baked by the Hayman Fire.
“We showed you could do it,” says Ryan, “but there wouldn’t be very many trees planted, maybe 500 or 600 acres, and those trees grow pretty slowly.” In other words, not much carbon would be removed. “It doesn’t add up to a whole lot of carbon credits,” he says.
The atmospheric benefits of replanting forests in burned areas are measureable, at least. Less clear is the value of thinning forests, to lower stand density and reduce the risk of fire. With vast forests of aging and now beetle-killed trees in Colorado and elsewhere in the West, it’s a matter of cutting-edge relevance. The thinking is that these thinned trees can be ground up and burned in a biomass plant to produce electricity, replacing power that would have been generated by burning coal, oil or natural gas.
It sounds reasonable, but is this really an “additional” action beyond what the Forest Service would do normally? “It’s tricky, it’s really tricky,” says Ryan. “The more I look into this issue, the more I realize that the folks who were working the first Kyoto Treaty didn’t want forestry in there…Paying somebody for something that is already there, that’s tough. It’s like paying somebody not to rob you.”
As a general idea, using the carbon market to guide and finance management of forests sounds appealing, says Ryan. The truth of actual applications, however, he finds “kind of slippery and squishy.”
Squishy or not, the Forest Service is moving ahead. Recently, the agency announced a partnership with the National Forest Foundation that allows people to buy voluntary carbon offsets in transactions handled on the foundation’s website. The money is to be used for carbon sequestration demonstration projects that will illustrate the value of forests as part of a larger climate change management strategy. The first demonstration project is scheduled for this summer in the Custer National Forest, which straddles the border between Montana and South Dakota, where a burned area will be planted with ponderosa pine seedlings. Two more reforestation projects are planned next year on the Plumas and San Bernardino National Forests in California.
But questions—and doubts—linger. Senator John F. Kerry and Representative Edward Markey, both of Massachusetts, articulated some of those concerns in a letter to Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell last summer. “How will you ensure all projects not only result in specific and measurable reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, but also adhere to other ecologically and scientifically sound forestry management practices?” they wanted to know. More revealing, they wondered how the Forest Service intended to verify that “carbon credit purchases from corporate or other entities are not used to increase or influence post-disturbance, thinning and commercial logging projects?” And how, they asked, would the agency “protect current old-growth and mature forest types?”
CALIFORNIA ON THE LEADING EDGE
Similar questions are being asked in California as the state tries to set up a climate registry. In 2000, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection began looking at how to mesh forest management and carbon markets. The pace picked up in 2006 when legislators adopted the Global Warming Solutions Act, which mandates that greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 be half those of 1990. The mandate provides the enforcement lacking in voluntary carbon-offset programs. “We have been moving forward in a tempestuous way since then,” says Doug Wickizer, chief of environmental protection and regulation for the state forestry agency.
Disagreements have surfaced over what a carbon reduction truly is, and who is qualified to verify it. The concerns mirror those expressed by Kerry and Markey. The Chicago Climate Exchange established standards and protocols, but they have been described as a “black box.” California, working in partnership with five other western states, plus British Columbia, in an effort called the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, has been pursuing an agreement about how this new market will work. Three carbon-reduction forestry projects, all sponsored by conservation groups, are soon to be certified under a previously established climate registry. The idea of planting trees to absorb carbon is clearly of benefit.
The Forest Service also wants to firm up the science about what kind of projects can be truthfully credited with carbon reductions. Research now being conducted on the Mendocino National Forest, north of San Francisco and Sacramento, may provide answers. On a 4,000-acre tract called Alder Springs, 500 acres of forest are being logged. The ground-up wood will be hauled eighty-six miles north to a fifty-megawatt biomass power generator near Redding, or a similar but smaller plant near Oroville. Those biomass generators will reveal how much heat or electricity can be generated by a ton of wood chips. The testing will also track the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released when the chips are burned. However, if forest thinning is to get credit for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then other, seemingly extraneous parts of the carbon cycle must be accounted for, such as the cost and greenhouse gas emissions of transporting the wood to biomass burners.
Another goal in this research is to calculate the behavior of wildfire, or wildfire that would have happened had there been no thinning, says Nechodom, a principal investigator at Alder Springs. “The question is can that be done with enough precision to interest somebody in the market,” he says. “As a scientist, first and foremost, I am saying I am skeptical. But I am obviously spending a bunch of your taxpayer dollars to see if it can be measured with much precision. It depends fundamentally upon modeling [wildfire] behavior, because you can’t do that sort of controlled experiment at any kind of scale.” Given what is now known, he adds, it’s not clear whether the science justifies a market value for forest thinning.
Allen M. Solomon, national program leader for global change research with the Forest Service, has been working on the carbon cycle for thirty years in various capacities. “It wasn’t really until the late ’70s or early ’80s that there was good recognition that the terrestrial earth was contributing carbon dioxide,” he says. The deepening question is whether vegetation can be managed to absorb more carbon.
“The answer is yes, but it’s a ‘yes’ that has some pretty strong limits,” says Solomon. Even in 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted that as much as 20 percent of the carbon already in the atmosphere could be sequestered in forests. However, achieving this goal will cost money. Reforestation after fires, Solomon says, must be extensive and use plants that will have optimal growth in future climates.
More accurate remote sensing of forest plots is needed to determine the values assigned to forests for sequestering carbon. “The forest inventory analysis program is really quite limited, with only one sample for every 7 to 10 kilometers, and even then taken only once every five years. That’s just not adequate for a data base to estimate the amount of carbon that has been sequestered in a given year,” says Solomon.
“A tremendous amount has been learned, but the questions just get juicier—and more expensive to answer, come to think about it.”
Mark E. Harmon, a forest science professor at Oregon State University, has studied carbon cycles for decades, and he doesn’t totally reject forest tinkering to increase carbon absorption. It can work, and the Forest Service probably has a role in the emerging carbon market, he says. But the devil is in the details.
Creating young, fast-growing forests will increase carbon absorption, but not if old trees are cut down to make way for the new forest, he says. “On the other hand, if you are taking marginal agricultural land and replacing it with young forests, the odds are good that carbon will be removed from the atmosphere.
“My problem is that many folks in and outside of government are proposing steps with no context and no details,” he says. “I want to hear the entire deal.”
For forests and the carbon market to mesh, Harmon believes there needs to be some authority—preferably the federal government—that establishes protocols, rules of measuring and requirements for monitoring. And there must be real money at stake, not just voluntary offsets.
Ann Ingerson, a Vermont-based research associate with The Wilderness Society, agrees on the inadequacy of voluntary offsets. “We really need a cap-and-trade system in the United States before this will shake itself out,” she says. “Right now, it’s chaos. We have all these voluntary markets. I think that has undermined the idea of using forests for carbon. We have all kinds of fly-by-night operations out there selling carbon credits. Nobody really knows how much carbon is getting fixed from these voluntary markets. We need a regulated market.
“And even then, the more I study the projects, the more I am skeptical that carbon credits are going to be affordable. You need to do monitoring, and it may turn out that the monitoring may cost more than the carbon will be worth. We really need to be careful that we are producing the offset that we say we will. It can’t just be greenwash.”
On the face of it, she adds, integrating forests and the carbon market seems to make sense. “But when you think about the nitty-gritty of how are you going to make this work, it really overwhelms you.”
Or, as Mike Ryan in Colorado might put it, there’s a lot of squishiness out there—and it may get squishier rather than clearer. “That’s just a guess,” he says.