Forests: A defense against climate change impacts
We are drilling and burning the earth’s vast reserves of coal, oil, and gas. The resulting fossil fuel emissions are a primary source of climate change. While the United States is dragging its feet, there are communities and governments around the world focused on reducing greenhouse gases before we overheat the planet. To date, not much attention is given to the large living stores of carbon on the earth, including the massive old-growth forests that blanket the Pacific Northwest.
The carbon locked up in forests offsets over one fifth of global climate pollution! However, we spend only a tiny fraction of our energy and resources protecting these carbon rich ecosystems. Very few climate policies integrate forest conservation into the strategies to curtail climate change. In southern Oregon and northern California, we are surrounded by one of the largest carbon stores in the Northern Hemisphere, and the way we manage these forests will help decide the fate of our climate.
Forests are key to a livable climate
There are “natural solutions” to climate change, and forest conservation is nature’s greatest asset for helping reverse our dangerous climate path. Simply put, forest conservation and climate smart management will lessen future rises in carbon in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, logging practices over the past 150 years have led to the removal of many of our rich carbon stores. If we made changes by protecting carbon rich forests and transition away from clearcut logging toward sustainable forest management, we would help reverse the trend of climate change.
Forest conservation fights climate change
Forests are the lungs of the planet. All life is made of carbon. Plants, including trees, absorb carbon from the air to form their needles, branches, and trunks. In healthy, ancient forests, organisms in the soil, tree roots, and fungi also hold tons of carbon beneath ground. By doing this, trees are performing carbon sequestration—the long-term storage of carbon that helps avoid prevent worsening climate change. Old growth forests—containing trees that are often centuries old in a rich bed of living soil—store the most carbon. If we protect these forests, they continue to grow and uptake carbon, and they keep it stored, sometimes for hundreds of years.
Old-growth and clear-cut logging is carbon pollution
If a forest is logged of its large trees, that carbon is no longer captured, it is mostly released into the atmosphere contributing to climate change. Only 15% of a tree’s carbon is stored in wood products, as much of the carbon is lost in logging residue, mill waste, and transportation of timber products. Young forests do sequester carbon, but old forests are storing and sequestering much more carbon. Carbon emissions resulting from industrial forest management practices are a massive contribution to climate change; it is greater than even the emissions from the transportation sector! One study found that industrial logging reduced in-forest carbon stores by 34 percent between 2001 and 2015.