Can We Manage and Use Our Forests Even More to Slow Climate Change?

One approach is to leave forests be - let them grow naturally to maturity and fix carbon in the trees and soils over time. Planting more trees would help, too. However, another approach, proposed in a recent life cycle study, would be to manage our forests more intensively to produce more wood products and bioenergy. Which approach is likely to do more to slow climate change?

August 15, EESI’s Climate Change News reported on a new study that found that “the Earth’s forests absorb a staggering amount of carbon from the atmosphere each year, an amount equivalent to one-third of annual fossil fuel emissions.” The study underscores how important it is to protect and restore healthy forests.

But could forests be managed to do even more to stop harmful climate change?

Over time, mature, unmanaged forests will sequester less and less carbon, and, in a changing climate, they may become vulnerable to more intense wildfires, disease, and pests. Eventually, unmanaged forests may actually release more carbon to the atmosphere than they store.

Another approach would be to establish carbon policies that would increase demand for renewable wood products and bioenergy and encourage forest owners to manage their forests more intensively to produce these products. The goal would be to steadily displace fossil energy-intensive building materials like steel and concrete with wood, and displace fossil fuel use with renewable woody biomass residues derived from intensified forest management activities and growing wood products industries. Assuring sustainable forestry practices over the long term would be essential. Over time, this approach could cumulatively sequester far more carbon in biomass and displace far more fossil fuel consumption than unmanaged forests will. These are the findings of a recently published study Life Cycle Impacts of Forest Management and Wood Utilization on Carbon Mitigation: Knowns and Unknowns

Of course, as the authors acknowledge, slowing climate change is only one of the many things that we rely upon our forests for. We also treasure them for the biodiversity, wildlife, clean water, clean air, beauty, and recreation that they provide. Future climate and forest policies will need to recognize and balance these many priorities. Many forests should be preserved as is for their ecological, wilderness, or other core values. But perhaps, with the right policy incentives and price on fossil carbon emissions, millions of acres of working forests could be managed to a new, higher level of productivity and help even more to slow harmful climate change.