Hello, everyone – I hope you don’t start considering me to be the “late Friday afternoon guy,” but I have been giving some thought to how we might broaden the aperture of the group a bit with some more level-setting information that looks at our nation as whole:
• As laid out in the forest utilization slides I have already shared, our forests can be divided into publicly and privately owned and working forests (those managed for forest products, like building products), and non-working forests (those that are not managed for products)
• Of all the forests in our country, 47% are private working forests. Those are the kinds of forests NAFO represents (btw, our members have no holdings in Alaska)
• Each year forests in the United States sequester enough net carbon to offset 15% of our annual industrial emissions. That amounts to over 1.5 gigatons of CO2e (that’s a lot of carbon).
• Although private working forests comprise 47% of our nation’s forests, they account for 73% of this net annual sequestration, or over 1.1 gigatons – enough to nearly offset the carbon emissions from the entire transportation sector.
• To put this into perspective, each year private working forests sequester nearly 20 times more net carbon than the entire National Forest System managed by the US Forest Service. They sequester 7.5 times more carbon than national forests on a per-acre basis.
• Since 1958 the US population has grown by 84%. That is a lot of people who need a lot of things, including over 5,000 different kinds of forest-based products.
• During this period the total forest acreage in our country has remained relatively constant, and the total volume of wood in our forests has increased by 58%. Most of that came from private working forests.
• Today we grow 43% more wood on private working forests than we harvest each year.
• And remember that we harvest about 2% of the private working forest land base annually and replant that many acres each year. We plant over 1 billion trees a year (a conservative estimate).
• Bottom line – private working forests must be doing something right. That’s a good starting place for our ongoing discussion.