Forestry Today: Wildfires, Climate Change, and New Economic Opportunities

BY DAVID HODES

There are currently nearly 15 million hectares (37 million acres) of forest in the U.S. under forest management—only Canada (47 million hectares) and Sweden (20 million hectares) have more government-managed forest land.

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In general, about 304 million hectares of the U.S. land mass is forested, privately and publicly owned, or about 32 percent of the total landmass, according to figures from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Now there are new ways to manage and control forests as outlined by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which has taken steps to broaden its scope and address the provision of ecosystem services, according to an FSC report, “Global Strategy 2021-2026.”

This means that forests are now recognized for not only their timber, but also for the valuable way they help the environment by addressing global warming fears.

The FSC anticipates an enhanced relevance of market mechanisms, products, and services that work in favor of forests and the landscapes. This means that economic opportunities can be created that not only promote sustainable forest management but also drive positive environmental outcomes.

The FSC also aims to improve the integration and leverage of forest stewardship within forest governance systems, policy frameworks, and regulations. By strengthening the ties between responsible forest management and governance structures, according to the report, the FSC can ensure that sustainable practices are part of both the decision-making processes and regulatory frameworks that govern forests.

The Wildfire Dilemma

According to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) for 2022, there were 68,988 fires that burned 7,577,183 acres of forest in the U.S., which averages out to 109 acres burned per fire. It was worse in 2020, where 10 million acres of forest were burned, representing 176 acres burned per fire.

An average of 7 million acres were burned by wildfires each year from 2001-2020, according to NIFC data.

A new study by the USDA forest service proposes five suggestions shifting the approach of wildfire from a simple to complex risk, and building solutions that increase adapting to and coexisting with wildfire.

Huge wildfires in Canada in 2023 brought the need of containment into sharper focus as the U.S. began moving into wildfire season starting in July. Forestry managers are looking at a bigger picture of wildfire control.

“In the U.S., we have a lot of forests that are just right for burning because we’ve been suppressing any kind of fire that can happen,” Brad Kahn, communications director for the FSC, told BXJ. “Fire is natural, coming from sources like lightning for thousands of years,” he said. “So it was really just in the last maybe 100 years or so, that we started to take on the position of trying to put out every fire, because if you have a home near a forest that’s burning, it makes a lot of sense to try to put the fire out. The net effect of 100 years of fire suppression is that a lot of our forests across the entire continent are just ripe to burn.”

Most fires are started by people, he said, who toss out cigarettes alongside the roadside or don’t put out campfires properly. “So we have this confluence of more ways to start a fire and a lot more fuel for those fires that burn hotter,” he said.

The forestry service spends three-quarters of its budget each year fighting fires. “One fire can cause billions of dollars of damage,” Kahn said. “We need to help those people who are impacted. But if you ask for billions of dollars to do treatments of wildfire prone forests, that’s a much harder hill to climb.”

New Goals Of Forestry Management

Forestry management has to respond to changes in how people want to live, Kahn said. “With the internet, and remote work and all the rest, people are moving out into the forest more and more with greater risk to their homes,” he said. “There is also a new and growing constituency that doesn’t necessarily favor active forestry management,” such as controlled or prescribed fires and other methods of thinning the forest.

Other challenges were discussed in a speech to the World Conservation Congress in September, 2016, by Tom Tidwell, chief of the USDA Forest Service. Many challenges with forests are associated with drought, wildfire, invasive species, and outbreaks of insects and disease—all made worse by climate change. “Climate change has contributed to beetle outbreaks in many western states,” Tidwell said. “Winter cold is no longer limiting bark beetles, resulting in beetle infestations on a massive scale. On the national forests alone, the area affected has reached almost 13 million hectares. In California alone, there are now an estimated 66 million dead trees.”

He talked about other activities that the USDA Forest Service is monitoring, such as the conversion of forests to business developments, and the spread of homes and communities into fire-prone forests. “By 2060, our population (in the U.S.) is expected to grow to somewhere between 400 and 500 million, and we could see a net forest loss of up to 15 million hectares,” he said in his speech. “For the first time in more than a century, the United States is facing a net forest loss.”

Forests And Their Economic Value

Tidwell also outline some positive changes that are being

Wood products and wood energy are the lifeblood of many local economies, and are critical to healthy forests. The Forest Service supports innovation and new markets. Photo courtesy of Marcus Kauffman, Oregon Department of Forestry worked on, because forests have economic value. They can generate wealth through recreation and tourism, through the creation of green jobs, and through the production of wood products and energy, he said. “But wood has gotten a bad rap. There’s a widespread misconception that building from cement or steel is better for the environment than using wood. We need to dispel those misconceptions, because putting wood to good use is a key strategy for climate change mitigation,” Tidwell said.

He cited other examples: Wood both stores carbon and replaces more carbon-intensive materials. Lumber is eight times less fossil-fuel-intensive than cement for example, and 21 times less fossil-fuel-intensive than steel.

One example of using wood for a more climate-friendly environment is in Stockholm, Sweden, called “Wood City”, extending over nearly 3 million square feet, and billed as the world’s largest urban construction project in wood ever.

The new area houses an additional 7,000 office spaces and 2,000 homes in Sickla, in the southern parts of Stockholm. It will offer a vibrant, urban environment with a mix of workplaces, housing, restaurants and shops. The first buildings are expected to be completed in 2027.

Climate Change And Forests

The reality is that harvesting wood from national forests is difficult, Kahn said. “We all think about the national forests but relatively speaking, less volume is harvested there,” he said.

He added that anytime anyone wants to do harvest activities on the national forests, frequently there’s a fight with the local environmental groups or the local communities. “Those harvest levels in the national forests are way down from what they were 20 to 30 years ago,” he said.

Most harvesting of wood is done on private forest land. But the owners of that private land are struggling today.

Kahn explained: “Frequently you have private forest landowners we might call family woodlands or family forest owners. These are families that own maybe 100 or even 1,000 acres. They are they’re doing a little bit of harvesting each year but it doesn’t make them necessarily rich. That land costs money. So let’s say they have four kids. And when they pass on their land to those kids, it’s comes with maybe $100,000 a year in property taxes. Then each kid makes a different decision about what to do with their share of the land, and that 1,000 acres gets split up into 250 acres each. Two of them decide to sell some for housing, someone else decides to have 100 cattle or who knows what. And that fragmentation, especially between generations, is what’s driving a lot of the deforestation in the United States.”

Kahn said that there’s actually an economic rationale for keeping that land as a forest, and the forestry service is thinking about forests as natural climate solutions. “So right now, globally, about a third of the carbon that is emitted by humanity needs to be sucked up. We have one technology today that can remove carbon from the atmosphere at a scale that can make a difference. That is the forest. So forests are pretty much our biggest solution in terms of getting that carbon out of the atmosphere that’s already in there.”

There is a lot of work on direct air capture and other strategies to accomplish what forest can do for the climate, he said, which he hopes will be scalable.

According to the International Energy Agency, direct air capture is a technology that extracts CO2 directly from the atmosphere that can be permanently stored in deep geological formations. The captured CO2 can be used in food processing or combined with hydrogen to produce synthetic fuels. “Today, (those technologies) are very expensive and operating at a very small scale. So for the landowners who are just trying to make a rational economic decision and say that they are going to sell their forest to someone else or cut it down or whatever, we need to give them more economic value for keeping it.” X