Carbon sequestration dreams

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop on Climate and Forests in Flagstaff, AZ. The field trip before the start of the workshop took us to areas of aspen decline, pinyon mortality, and other landscapes devastated by recent fires. On the second day, speakers from the forest industry gave interesting presentations about what they saw was the future of their trade: Carbon credits for growing young trees and revenue from wood sold as a renewable source of energy.

I had many questions but unfortunately there was no time to ask the speaker. I wanted to ask them how they could display graphics showing 40-year rotations of firs in Washington state, talking about sustainability in the future to produce long term storage products and reduce carbon emissions. I live in Olympia, WA, and watch boat loads of 40 year old douglas firs, shipped to Japan to make pulp. Not exactly long term storage. Mark Harmon and Bev Law from Oregon State University have spent much of their career showing the magnitude of carbon losses associated with timber management but their hard work is rarely cited and inexact carbon pool and flux values are brandied about without real understanding of how they have been estimated.

I also live in a state where in Dec 2006 a powerful windstorm brought down many trees on the Olympic Peninsula, causing significant revenue losses to the timber industry. Such windthrow events have occurred before in the region (there was much stronger storm in 1962) but have also been well documented more recently in western Europe where their frequency might be increasing. Windstorms in December 1999 caused $19 billions in revenue losses to foresters and created a glut of wood (140 million m3 in France only) with no demand for it. Again in January 2009, 60% of the Landes pine forest was razed by a windstorm that also affected northern Spain with 1 million m3 of wood on the ground in France only. Back in Washington, the 2006 winter brought in Washington not only windthrow damage but also torrential rains that triggered massive landslides and destroyed the road network in Mt Rainier National Park, causing its compete closure for 6 months. In 2007, widespread flooding closed the I5 interstate for several days and hurricane force winds caused over a billion dollars in damages including significant forest mortality. Flooding occurred again in 2009, each time generating more landslides in timberland where soils may have been destabilized by short rotation cycles. The hundred-year floods have been occurring 3 times in the decade!

Other disturbances are affecting our forests. In 2006, Westerling et al. published in Science an article that warned of the effects of climate change on fire danger in western forests. "In the last 20 years, the area scorched by fire in the western U.S. was six times greater than in the two decades that preceded it." Forest mortality around the world (Allen et al. 2010) is being observed and monitored. Insect outbreaks have been shown to cause billions of timber losses in Canada, decimating southwestern pinyon pines and Rocky Mountains forests. With some awareness of the risk of fires, floods, pest outbreaks and windthrow to the sutainability of forests, especially young homogeneous stands of single timber species, it is difficult to keep a positive outlook on the likelihood of the timber industry to provide a sustainable carbon sink as the climate warms as well as a sustainable source of renewable energy as demand increases with population growth and extreme cold events increase in frequency.

Despite the so-called controversy fueled by the media, it is high time that corporate entities, agencies, and political bodies come to grip with the reality of a more variable climate and the general warming of the planet. Scientists have done their best to synthesize current knowledge, describe recent events, and document the existing trends. There needs to be an honest dialogue about what can be done to provide income to foresters, protect the environment from mismanagement, and prepare for increased risks of disturbance and deleterious effects on society. A significant body of knowledge and many datasets now exist to help develop strategies through constructive interactions between scientists, forest land owners, economists, and politicians to manage our lands sustainably.