Sally Collins photo courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture
Sally Collins, a former U.S. Forest Service ranger and more recently the associate chief of the Forest Service, is the director of the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets, a new office within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The role of the office, opened in December 2008, is to develop science-based methods for measuring environmental services from conservation and land management activities on farm, ranch and forest lands. The hope is that the effort will help owners participate in emerging markets for these services.
Collins once headed the Forest Service’s Valuing Ecosystem Services program; now she’s applying that perspective to farm and ranch land as well. As directed by Congress in the 2008 Farm Bill, she’s focusing initially on activities that capture and sequester carbon. Collins spoke to Forest Magazine from her Washington, D.C., office.
You’ve already led work by the Forest Service on valuing ecosystem services. What’s been learned from that program, and how will the Office of Ecosystem Services build on it?
We’ve been experimenting with several projects that took actions and then measured the environmental services that resulted from them, including carbon sequestration and water quality and quantity enhancement. But those projects haven’t turned the activities into markets. We’ve expanded the National Forest Foundation’s voluntary carbon offset program, so if you want to offset a trip to Washington, D.C., you can go onto their website and have them plant some trees that will sequester carbon emissions to offset your trip. They have a rigorous process for measuring the offsets and counting carbon. But we want to get forest managers to think about what it means to manage for carbon, which is a different concept for them and requires different analytics from what they use now.
How might national forests and private forests earn economic credits for carbon sequestration—for example, if the United States adopts a mandatory cap-and-trade program to cut greenhouse gas emissions?
For a lot of reasons, we don’t anticipate that federal land will be included in a carbon trading system, although it could play a role in related initiatives—for example, creating a strategic carbon reserve. Direct carbon trading will be an issue for private landowners. That’s partly because the goal of creating carbon markets is to generate new and creative income streams that give owners an incentive to keep their land forested instead of developing it.
For example, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that the House passed in June [HR 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009] caps greenhouse gas emissions from certain sectors of the economy like electricity generators and manufacturers. Emitters who can’t meet their caps can invest in offsets that will help them reach their emissions reduction targets. [The bill allows covered entities to offset as much as 2 billion tons of emissions using EPA-approved domestic and international offset credits.]
If a policy like that is enacted into law, that’s where the Department of Agriculture would bring in what we know about reforestation and afforestation and would recommend a suite of activities that could be traded. The market would decide the economic value of those activities, but we would specify what they were worth in terms of tons of carbon. The same process would apply to agricultural and ranching practices like no-till land management.
A carbon trading system needs three key elements to operate: standards, a registry and verification. The Depart-ment of Agriculture and other agencies would set the standards for activities that sequestered carbon. Farmers or forest owners would need a place to register the carbon that they sequestered, and someone would have to verify that they actually did what they pledged. A registry would also be key because that’s where buyers would go to purchase offset credits.
There’s a lot of talk about whether the Department of Agriculture would manage these specific offset programs, but we would be involved in any case through our extension agents, state foresters and local conservation districts, which would work with landowners to redesign their portfolios of activities to include carbon sequestration.
The process is comparable to trading land development rights. Purchasers would buy the attributes (in this case, carbon storage) but not the actual land, and owners would be making a commitment to deliver those attributes for a given period of time.
Couldn’t this approach work for the Department of Agriculture too, as an incentive to keep land forested instead of harvesting? Or are there other constraints that would make it hard for national forests to participate in carbon trading?
No policy call has been made yet. My view is a gut feeling based on talking to hundreds of people about how markets might work and thinking through societal needs now. What led me into the ecosystem services sphere was watching 6,000 acres of private land being lost every day to subdivisions, shopping malls and other kinds of development. That’s a permanent conversion. There’s a saying that “blacktop is the final rotation,” and we don’t want to promote that trend. We’ve got about 190 million acres of national forests that we know won’t be developed that way, but we want to figure out what’s driving the conversion of private forested lands and other privately held open space. One incentive to keep forested lands forested is to develop new markets for their products, including not only ecosystem services but also energy and biofuel markets, specialized wood products and other commodities that can create new value in the forest sector.
That’s not to say that national forests don’t need more funding. But my early instinct is that flooding the market with credits on public lands would reduce the value of those credits for private investors. People who want to invest in ecosystem services could gravitate to public lands because they would have more long-term certainty about use of the land, but my feeling is that we don’t want public lands competing with private owners.
There’s a pretty wide body of research on measuring carbon uptake in different types of forests. How good do you think the science is in this area? How might a federal program for crediting forest carbon uptake be measured and verified?
It can be tricky depending on the type of forest, the location and how you manage the land, but it’s doable. And there’s some really good science to base it on. One good thing about the voluntary markets that have evolved in the past decade is that a lot of work has been done on forest carbon storage. Thirteen Forest Service scientists contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as authors and reviewers and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the panel for its assessments of climate science.
I think we’ve developed some really strong metrics in forestry over the past decade, and we’re going to get better at them by the minute when we start assigning dollar values to these activities. Investors will go where the science is good and where people have faith that a certain action will produce a certain amount of carbon storage. People are looking at [regional greenhouse gas reduction standards adopted by California and the Northeast states] because they set pretty high standards under their protocols. The research is starting to coalesce, and the areas where there are differences are becoming more narrow.
What are some of the other important services from forests that your office will be studying and quantifying?
The Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service has been doing a lot of work with farmers to improve the quality of water coming off of farms. Nutrient pollution is a major contributor to dead zones in water bodies like the Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico and Puget Sound. In a couple of places, the Natural Resource Service has experimented with nutrient trading.
We’re also looking at activities that can be carried out in uplands to help maintain water supplies—for example, managing uplands in the West. The Fraser Experimental Forest has been doing water supply research for almost a century, and a lot of scientists’ findings there can be extrapolated to apply to climate change.
In California we’ve found that upper areas of forests are most likely to burn if they have too many trees because of fire suppression. So we need to treat those areas in ways that will reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, which will help protect communities lower down from erosion and debris flows. In Colorado and California, the Forest Service is looking at restoration treatments that can reduce sediment flows off forested landscapes to protect water supplies. Maybe water districts can be persuaded to pay the Forest Service and other land managers to manage lands in ways that will reduce erosion and reduce their need to dredge reservoirs.
How would this approach affect the way in which forest managers approach their missions? What kind of priority would ecosystem services get compared to other uses like timber, mining or recreation? Would it mean a more hands-off approach, or could it require more of certain kinds of intervention?
We need to think about managing our public forests for a suite of ecosystem services that the landscape provides, especially at a time of climate change. Rather than thinking about public lands producing X recreation days and Y board feet, we should be counting how much water of what quality we’ll provide to communities, how much carbon the land will sequester, and how much habitat. You don’t necessarily put the forests into markets, but you increase the portfolio for which you manage and think about services as well as products. Ecosystem services probably are not a big revenue source for national forests, but Congress might want to invest more in public forests if it sees valuable services coming from them.
How would that happen? Do you envision quantifying benefits and return on investment for congressional oversight committees?
I would make the case through forest planning, where we look at what ecosystem services a particular national forest or a set of forests in a region provides, such as water purification or carbon sequestration. Traditionally when we think of value from forests, we picture a truck full of logs moving down a road, but in this case we’d be describing services provided by standing trees, like the capacity of soil to hold water longer or reduced potential for landslides. We know what it takes to fight a fire or to clean up after a debris flow, so if we can quantify those requirements, then we can tell Congress what costs it can avoid by investing in forests. They’d be putting money into “green infrastructure” instead of the traditional kind.
I also think that the Forest Service will have a very robust state and private program to advise landowners about environmental markets. This is going to be an important income stream for private forest landowners. In the public sector we’ll see forest plans written in a different kind of language that speaks directly to climate-change effects and the kinds of services that a forest is able to provide based on credible climate-change scenarios. We’ll start to see things much more from a service perspective, and that ultimately will shift what we choose to manage for. I think the notion of managing for environmental services and enabling the market to help you do it is the future of conservation.
What would you like to see the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets accomplish between now and 2012?
Our vision is that private landowners would be able to invest in conservation just as easily as they invest in a corn or wheat crop—the markets would be that easy and accessible. That’s our dream, and it could happen over the next decade.