Northwest Forest Plan has unintended benefit – carbon sequestration
CORVALLIS, Ore. – The Northwest Forest Plan enacted in 1993 was designed to conserve old-growth forests and protect species such as the northern spotted owl, but researchers conclude in a new study that it had another powerful and unintended consequence – increased carbon sequestration on public lands.
When forest harvest levels fell 82 percent on public forest lands in the years after passage of this act, they became a significant carbon “sink” for the first time in decades, absorbing much more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. At the same time, private forest lands became close to carbon neutral.
Carbon emission or sequestration is a key factor in global warming, and a concept now gaining wider interest is the role of forest lands in helping to address concerns about the greenhouse effect.
Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the USDA Forest Service created these assessments with a new system that incorporates satellite remote sensing and more accurately simulates ecological processes over broad areas. It considers such factors as the growth of trees, decomposition, fire emissions, climate variation and wood harvest.
“The original goals of the Northwest Forest Plan had nothing to do with the issue of carbon emissions, but now carbon sequestration is seen as an important ecosystem service,” said David Turner, a professor in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society.
“Forests provide many services, such as habitat protection, recreation, water purification, and wood production,” he said. “Carbon sequestration has now been added to that list. And our approach can provide the kind of spatially and temporally explicit data that will help evaluate the potential trade-offs associated with management activities.”
Previous estimates of forest carbon balance had suggested a significant loss of carbon from Pacific Northwest forest lands between 1953 and 1987, associated with a high rate of old-growth timber harvest. Those harvests peaked in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Forest fire is also an issue in carbon emissions, but researchers said in the study that the magnitude of emissions linked to fire was modest, compared to the impacts of logging. Even the massive Biscuit Fire in southern Oregon in 2002 released less carbon into the atmosphere than logging-related emissions that year, they said.
The findings are of some interest, researchers said, because the value of carbon sequestration is now something that can be better quantified in economic terms, and then incorporated into management decisions and policies.
This study was just published online in Forest Ecology and Management, a professional journal. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the interagency North American Carbon Program. The area analyzed included western Oregon, western Washington and northern California.
In earlier work, Turner and other researchers had found that carbon sequestration in Oregon, much of it from forests, amounted to almost half of the state-level carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Nationally, forest carbon accumulation offsets about 15 percent of U.S. fossil fuel emissions.
Editor’s Note: A graphic image of lands affected by the Northwest Forest Plan is available online: http://bit.ly/qCa1CP
The study this story is based on is available online: http://bit.ly/oxld5b
“ . . . it had another powerful and unintended consequence – increased carbon sequestration on public lands. ”
This could just as truthfully be written:
it had another powerful and unintended consequence – increased fuel accumulation on public lands.
So… they stopped cutting down trees and the darn things just kept on growing bigger.
Whodathunkit?
“Forests provide many services, such as habitat protection, recreation, water purification, and wood production,” he said.
Yeah, except logging is apparently bad because it releases more “carbon” than forest fires, so wood production should be removed from that list, right? Ho-hum. Just what you’d expect from OSU researchers.
How much CO2 is “sequestered” by a corn field? By a banana plantation? By a tomato greenhouse?
Why don’t we ever see any data on huge CO2 “sequestration” by human activities all over the Earth?
John F. Hultquist says:
July 24, 2011 at 10:01 pm
“This could just as truthfully be written:
it had another powerful and unintended consequence – increased fuel accumulation on public lands.”
Indeed. My first thought on reading this too. Will make more intense fires to blame on AGW.
Logging for lumber sequesters carbon…into houses and other structures. The removed trees are replaced by new ones that–surprise!–sequester more carbon. Trees that are no longer cut down in the protected areas for consumables like paper will just be cut down somewhere else. Oops.
Once the protected areas replace their logged trees, they’ll be in carbon equilibrium, as old trees die and decay to CO2 and new trees replace them…until they inevitably burn down (again), of course.
The study this story is based on is available online: http://bit.ly/oxld5b
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Kindest Regards
Several people have already hit on the key points, but this sounds like so much wishful thinking.
Young trees grow faster, and lock up more carbon than old trees. Managed forests and logging would be beneficial if carbon sequestration is what you are after.
And with fewer loggers working, they in turn buy less, lowering the carbon footprint even more!
“Carbon emission or sequestration is a key factor in global warming, and a concept now gaining wider interest is the role of forest lands in helping to address concerns about the greenhouse effect.”
For me this passage is no more than mystic words from ANOTHER WORLD.
Researchers said in the study that the magnitude of emissions linked to fire was modest, compared to the impacts of logging.
That’s ridiculous. We just had a fire in Arizona that burned over 600 sq mi of forest, almost 400,000 acres. Logging never harvests that many acres. Because of predatory environmental lawsuits and misguided federal bureaucratic practice, burned trees are not harvested, but are left to rot. This process releases over 2 times the CO2 that is produced in the initial burning. Furthermore, depending on how the harvested wood is used, the carbon is retained in wood products potentially for decades, even more than a century (houses, books).
Crowded forests are not healthy forests. Healthy trees grow better than sick trees. A larger tree can capture more carbon than a very large number of smaller trees (that seem to grow faster), because the larger trees have a greater surface area (think cambium). Good forest practice is to plant denser and then thin. Leave larger trees with greater spacing between them. Crowded forests are too dark, and take up too much water. Competition for water can leave trees weak and vulnerable to beetle infestation.
Thinner forests support greater biodiversity. The most biodiverse places are the interface between forests and meadows. These locations have the greatest variations in light, moisture, and temperature. Because of a century of bad policy, meadows today are often far smaller than they were in the past. Thinner forests allow more water to pass into streams and into groundwater. Watersheds are more productive with thinner forests. A lot of the snow falling on trees sublimes from the branches, whereas snowpack tends to retain water until it melts.
The correct policy should be to restore the forest to the 60 or so stems per acre the historic mountain forests had, reduced from the 600 or so today. Fires could be more frequent, but not catastrophic. They will burn slowly, low to the ground, and only some patches of dense trees would have a crown fire, not the whole forest. I’m afraid eastern Arizona may never recover. What was soil is probably hydrophobic clay now.
A given plot of land becomes esentially carbon neutral over many centuries, give or take natural climate fluctuations and events like natural fires.
If you harvest timber, you remove carbon. If it grows again, it reaches a near equilibrium again.
Planting more trees of greater carbon content than before produces sequestration. However, the trees have to be managed at their high C content for the sequestration to mean anything significant. What is more, they have to be managed in this high C state forever, or they are just a passing anomaly on the long scale of time.
Beware of investment in schemes that promise carbon credits from growing trees. They have value only if managed and management requires money – most likely yours.
Greens should not be allowed anywhere near plants or forests. They have no clue.
The ‘carbon sequestration’ normally crowed about in the UK is the pumping of power station gasses into the strata below. This technology is actually untried at the scale envisiged and there could/will be many pitfalls including great cost.
But why try when it can be proved scientifically that CO2 does not drive climate nor do we emitt a large volume in the greater scheme of things compared to the natural world. About 3% of the total so what is the problem?
Forests are a store of CO2 in that this valuble gas is used as a building block for plant cells. But are we worrying about forest management too much? I ask this question because natural forests are self renewing in that the normal life span of trees is in the hundreds of years whereas forests have existed for millions of years. They survive wildfire, flood, climate change and probably many other threats and still survive. It was long thought that wildfire was the ultimate threat but research in Yellowstone has shown that wildfires actually help the forest survive in that insect pests are destroyed and tree seeds are well suited to fire survival and soon recolonise the destroyed area. Worries about logging in the Amazon basin are also unwarrented due to rapid regrowth. It also helps local peoples earn money to live and ensures forest renewal.
It must be the human instinct to interfere and make better. There is no need to interfere and we cannot better nature. It is also a good thing to keep up producing CO2 because that is what plants need to grow.
Keep that SUV on the move!
What they really should have said is: “If we put the forests under lock & key, only the pure of Green will be able to pilgrimage to the Garden of Carbon.” Circular reasoning all the way, with a heavy fever.
I’m a bit skeptic over this. First of all the question in my opinion is not about whether or not to maintain the forest but rather how to maintain it as different priorities result in different kinds of maintenance. In my opinion, maintaining it to produce as large as possible wood mass is actually the correct way of maintaining a forest as the wood is the matter where the sequestered carbon is stored in the most stable form.
If we leave a forest completely unmaintained, its CO2 absorption will first grow as we eliminate young forest with low biomass – but later on, forest fires aside, the forest will grow old and it will start to contain growing amount of dead biomass which does not sequester any CO2 and rather releases it again, reducing the net CO2 abosrption effect again.
I am aware that logging is a great producent of CO2 as first of all, most of the tree mass (branches, leaves, bark, roots, …) is usually burnt or left to rot, both mostly releasing its carbon contents back to atmosphere. But not logging has even worse net effect as everything is in result left to rot. If it’s not true I’ll be glad to hear about in what form and how efficiently the carbon gets stored in the forest soil and how stable it is.
And another question is, after we figure out what kind of forest maintenance leads to the greatest long-time carbon sequestration, how big area of such forests would we need to completely stop currently observed CO2 increase – and I’m afraid here we get to some absurd numbers once again.
“increased carbon sequestration on public lands.”
This is a baloney statistic!
Do we really care that carbon is being sequestered “on public lands”?
No! We care how much carbon is being sequestered “from the management of public lands” period!
The wood harvested from the public lands sequestered in the structure of your house should be included in the figures for measuring wise public land management in the context of carbon sequestering. Here we have yet another case of a University selling its soul to the devil to fraudulently seek public approval for a forest plan where credit is NOT due!
IMO, protecting old growth forests is justified based upon other criteria. But measuring its success with a statistic custom created to suggest a benefit that does not exist is fraudulent!
Calling that sequestering is nonsense. After the trees die they will release the carbon again unless the sea level DOES rise very quickly and covers it all under sediments.
If cheap energy, either coal, oil or natural gas, or nuclear electric could be provided to every one in Haiti, then they could plant trees all over Haiti and the Haitians could stop burning wood. Sean Penn, where are you when you could really help?
Come to think of it- Wouldn’t it make sense for us to go back to using paper bags for our groceries, and then burying the bags in landfills? Think of all the carbon sequestration! (sarcasm off)
Carbon emission or sequestration is a key factor in global warming, and a concept now gaining wider interest is the role of forest lands in helping to address concerns about the greenhouse effect.
The entire premise is incorrect. It is like arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin which by definition assumes the existence of angels.
One thing that is provably correct is that increasing the amount of free CO2 in the atmosphere greatly increases the growth rate and heat and drought stress resistance of plants. So sequestering carbon will reduce food crops while people are starving. In the time you have read this several people will have died from starvation; yet with claims of a Canute like ‘prevention’ of an arguable millimeter rise in sea level, other well fed people spend huge sums on hare-brained schemes and windmills to further enrich themselves. And everyone crowds around them and gives them ‘peace prizes’.
In the papers conclusion:
“The spatially and temporally explicit nature of our carbon balance monitoring framework permits the ecosystem service of carbon sequestration to be juxtaposed with co-occurring ecosystem services such as wood production and conservation of biodiversity. This type of framework can move society in the direction of examining trade-offs among multiple ecosystem services.”
I am so glad to hear that their framework allows various services to be juxtaposed in a co-occurring manner and that this can move society in a certain direction.
I’m going to pick an example comment to respond to, but it seems many of you have the same issue:
“The wood harvested from the public lands sequestered in the structure of your house should be included in the figures for measuring wise public land management in the context of carbon sequestering.”
Have you stopped to think how much fuel is burned cutting down and moving those trees around? Clearly not. Otherwise you’d realise that logging is a carbon source, not a carbon sink.
As a number of people have mentioned already, carbon sequestration only takes place if a forest is growing – not when it becomes mature. In fact not too long ago, the latest edition of the “methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2” was released, isuggested that mature forests are bad because of the methane they release as dead plant material decays – burning is actually the best option for forest waste!
This is just OSU trying to justify the decimation of the Oregon logging industry caused by the “save the spotted owl” law.
If you really want to use forestry to sequester CO2 then you increase commercial logging as a managed production forest has a much higher density of wood – wasn’t it a recent WUWT posting that reported on a study showing two or three times greater C stored in the same area of managed than unmanaged forests? I can’t find it this morning as, but I will try to look later today.
Ian W says: July 25, 2011 at 4:55 am
Thank you for writing this.
As Green Peace whipper-snipped GM wheat trials here in Australia, having effectivley slowed GM rice, thank God there are still people as James Nachtwey and others, concerned with the real lives led by a great proportion of our world’s population.
And leading the fight with the use of science.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_fights_xdrtb.html